thow-01187

6 ms·

1.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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 sin
2.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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 goo
3.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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
4.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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
5.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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
6.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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
7.
by thow-01187 5y ago
> 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 hal
8.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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 acto
9.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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-nuclea
10.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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) - nucle
11.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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
12.
by thow-01187 5y ago
> 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
13.
by thow-01187 5y ago
> 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
14.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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. Liv
15.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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
16.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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 o
17.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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%
18.
by thow-01187 5y ago
Unfortunately, more often than not, the logic behind it is market segmentation, not technical or operational efficiency
19.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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 I
20.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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 busi
21.
by thow-01187 5y ago
Let's just say...that the data doesn't exactly support the thesis that the lack of venture funding is a drag on Europe's productivity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
22.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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
23.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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).
24.
by thow-01187 5y ago
> 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 fund
25.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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
26.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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 qu
27.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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.
28.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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 limite
29.
by thow-01187 5y ago
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
30.
by thow-01187 6y ago
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 y

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