pembrook

46 ms·

781.
by pembrook 2y ago
Not sure if you checked the link, Wikipedia has both Mean equivalised and Median equivalised charts. Americans rank #1 on both mean and median. So the point about the super rich distorting the mean is irrelevant. > But somehow it is jus
782.
by pembrook 2y ago
Yea, so wildly out of touch with reality. The governing elite are wizards of prediction! Sundar at Google knew LLMs were going to be huge after Google invented them, so that’s why they were first to market and… Oops. Maybe not? While it mig
783.
by pembrook 2y ago
I'm not insulting people who hate risk. For the stability and health of society, it's good that most people are that way. We need people who shake their fist at anything new or different to keep us sane (people like you it seems,
784.
by pembrook 2y ago
Nobody is against regulation that disfavors large incumbents to support competition instead. You'll struggle to find people who are against the Digital Markets Act for this reason. It literally only targets the potential monopolists. H
785.
by pembrook 2y ago
No need to "hear." This is easily Googled. Americans have the highest level of disposable income in the world, and it's not even close. Even Europe's mega-rich tax havens like Luxembourg have a lower disposable income th
786.
by pembrook 2y ago
This is a non sequitur. I'm not saying central planning in general is bad. Companies are an example of central planning. So are families. I'm saying communism is bad.
787.
by pembrook 2y ago
Ahhh yes, the old "because the market didn't turn out the way I wanted it to once, it means the entirety of the capitalist system and the idea of free markets is fundamentally broken" retort. I call this the "Jr. develop
788.
by pembrook 2y ago
But what are you suggesting? We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently; make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation; with the sole aim of achieving a utopian worker-cooperative owned world? Hrmmm, where have I heard th
789.
by pembrook 2y ago
Cuba still exists today and is ostensibly being run for the benefit of all workers. Why don’t you go visit a Cuban state-run grocery store and tell me how much you’d enjoy living there?
790.
by pembrook 2y ago
What if we said the point of a company was to make its employees' lives better? Good news. The world spent the entire last century experimenting with that idea. It did not work out well. I’ve already explained why. But, you are of co
791.
by pembrook 2y ago
The point of a company is to make a product that customers want, and make it as accessible as possible. “Taking over the market” and producing profit is only a byproduct of doing that. A competitor would wipe out that profit if there existe
792.
by pembrook 2y ago
Copying isn’t just how design works, it’s how everything works. Humans are imitation machines. We create new things by collecting, regurgitating and mutating stuff we experience, just like LLMs. In a vacuum man has no ideas outside of base
793.
by pembrook 2y ago
I mean, sure, you can rephrase "fleeing a communist dictatorship" as "company men wanting more pay." But it dramatically understates the issue. Moving from Madrid to Amsterdam to get a higher salary is not what we'r
794.
by pembrook 2y ago
What's happening in Cuba has no resemblance to what happens in Southern Europe. In Southern Europe, talent leaves for better job opportunities and higher salary. In Cuba, people are literally fleeing to achieve basic human rights and 2
795.
by pembrook 2y ago
Just because everybody is doing it, doesn’t mean it’s rational. The people who held onto their RSUs from being hired at Zoom during the height of the pandemic might not be so happy they chose to double down on their employment risk with inv
796.
by pembrook 2y ago
The fact you got downvoted is very amusing and, ironically, perfect evidence of what you're describing. The problem is there's no HN equivalent for tech people in Europe. So they're stuck here, hanging out with a bunch of Ame
797.
by pembrook 2y ago
That might be the trendy term for it now, but the strategy is as old as time. In old school economic terms its called "dumping." When international trade started becoming a major thing, aspiring monopolists would flood foreign mar
798.
by pembrook 2y ago
I don’t have a problem with advertising generally, as long as I know upfront that’s what funds a tool I’m using, and isn’t disguised like a non-ad (eg. Unlike what Google does, which is outright deception). Advertising and spam are two sepa
799.
by pembrook 2y ago
While this sucks, my phone is in so many data breaches at this point it doesn’t matter. The spam-to-ham ratio on my phone number is now far worse than any other channel for me. The traditional phone network is at risk of going the way of th
800.
by pembrook 2y ago
Why would you need a tool like this if you’re writing markdown docs outside the browser and version controlling them with Git? Doesn’t that defeat the entire purpose? Or is it just you want a developer-native workflow to upload docs intende
801.
by pembrook 2y ago
I always cringe whenever I see people giving McKinsey credit for stuff (good or bad). It's a powerpoint factory of 20-somethings with zero experience executing anything. To suggest the virtuous, humble Purdue management could never hav
802.
by pembrook 2y ago
I know big company/government types often (incorrectly) conflate "size of budget" with "amount of work being done." But this disincentivizes productivity and is a sign of a broken system of endlessly expanding do-no
803.
by pembrook 2y ago
If the IRS budget since the 80s hasn't decreased on a per-capita, inflation-adjusted basis, then something has gone horribly wrong. Why the heck would we want tax collection to get more inefficient every year? This one of the most mi
804.
by pembrook 2y ago
The problem is open protocols can just as easily be consolidated down to network monopolies at the application layer. Look at what happened to SMS (Apple's malicious implementation pushing everyone onto propriety networks like WhatsApp
805.
by pembrook 2y ago
It sounds like you weren’t sending very frequently, if you logged in anytime over those 5 months there was a banner letting you know it was getting shut down. If it makes you feel better, deliverability people will tell you a list that’s be
806.
by pembrook 2y ago
“Oversupply” is in the eye of the beholder. There’s a market clearing price for everything. The builders can hold out for a while, but the shoe has to drop eventually. Builders only make profit when building, and if your credit is extende
807.
by pembrook 2y ago
If we care about keeping open protocols like HTTP and SMTP alive, we need to overhaul DNS. Or at least create a simplified common abstraction layer. It’s the most inherently user-hostile thing I’ve ever encountered - and I’m only just now s
808.
by pembrook 2y ago
Email as a communication method with your friends/family — absolutely, this has been dead for over a decade I’d say. However, email has basically evolved into the way you communicate with “systems” and I’m kind of happy about it. Commu
809.
by pembrook 2y ago
You're basing that off of one of their highest profit quarters ever. 3X the average profit last year. Also, once you remove the profit incentive and kill the dividend (which goes into the world's pension funds via the public marke
810.
by pembrook 2y ago
They made $11.292B total profit for all of 2023. Also, what's more likely; One of the most efficient supply chain coordination companies in history with razor thin margins is leaving tons of cost savings on the table...or...random int

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