411–420 of 761 posts
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This seems like a very socialistic perspective to me, which might not align well with big tech and innovation. I suggest re-reading "Atlas Shrugged" for this topic.
We should definitely take the word of an infamous welfare queen (Ayn Rand) on how to run society, indeed
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The move-fast-and-break-things mentality of many tech companies has absolutely killed people. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/parents-kids-died-after-dr... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/business/instagram-suicid... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/electric-scooter-electric-bike-... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/family-sues-airbnb-19-m... https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/rohingya-seek-reparat... https:…
The hard part about reality is the opposite is also true. Cancer patients have gatekept access to cutting edge drugs, etc. I believe your worldview is correct and also incomplete. It’s really fucking hard to come up with general rules that cannot be gamed.
Not only the tech market, they're on a pace in destroying the agricultural market as well. Small, medium size farmers are disappearing fast, they quit or at best being absorbed by large farmcorps.
That’s already happened in the US without regulation, little farms don’t stand a chance against giant agribusinesses which may not even be US owned (largest pork producer is owned by Chinese) . In fact regulation is probably preventing it from happening faster in the EU.
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AAPL's profit is roughly equivalent to the GDP of Slovakia.
I understand you were rebutting OPs point that not every tech company is a capital furnace, but when framed in this manner, this sounds like something to be solved, not something to be proud of. That’s the difference between the EU and the US, and there is a strong case to be made that life is better in the EU when observing majorities. Who is benefiting from Apple’s profits being the size of a small country’s GDP? N…
Off the top of my head, probably the millions of people who have a pension through one of Apple’s institutional investors like CalPERS. The effects of Apple’s profitability goes far and wide.
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Apple makes a lot of profit because their products provide a lot of value. Do you think that if you compare the profit that Apple makes to the value that that users get that Apple has the larger share of it? To a disturbing degree?
Certainly, if a company’s profits are the size of a small country’s GDP, I find that disturbing regardless of the value they’re delivering. Value is the experience and consumer excess, profits are fiat. Could that same value be delivered with compressed profits leading to greater consumer excess? I believe so. Not all profits are earned, some are inherent once an org achieves a certain maturity or industry position.…
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I wonder how much we are actually losing on this side of the pond with that. Maybe it is for the best. I don't really trust those billion-dollar companies.
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I understand you were rebutting OPs point that not every tech company is a capital furnace, but when framed in this manner, this sounds like something to be solved, not something to be proud of. That’s the difference between the EU and the US, and there is a strong case to be made that life is better in the EU when observing majorities. Who is benefiting from Apple’s profits being the size of a small country’s GDP? N…
> Who is benefiting from Apple’s profits being the size of a small country’s GDP? Not most people, therefore, why would this be optimized for? Off the top of my head, probably the millions of people who have a pension through one of Apple’s institutional investors like CalPERS. The effects of Apple’s profitability goes far and wide.
This doesn’t entirely discount that CalPERS holds almost 40M shares (~$8.7B) of Apple (its top holding), just that them doing so is not reason enough to be more judicious about governing corporate profits. Still profits, but less. Those profits have to come from somewhere.
(CalPERS has $502.9B AUM ending June 2024, making APPL ~1.72% of their total assets)
https://www.calpers.ca.gov/docs/forms-publications/acfr-2023... (page 115)
https://calpers.ca.gov/page/newsroom/calpers-news/2024/calpe...
A company that provides a phone service (mobile or other) has to conform to a large amount of regulatory red tape. Why? because either a company before tried to monopolise the entire country, or they killed someone. Now, large tech companies haven't wholesale killed people (unlike say tobacco, or talc powder, 3M and half of their solvents, weed killer, most car makers, etc etc) but they have been trying desperately t…
I have a feeling there's a lot of analogies to be had between parenting, regulation and AI alignment. All three are about trying to persuade an intelligent organism to adopt acceptable, rich and virtuous behaviour. All three seems to have similar failure modes. Too much red tape and you'll get over fitting, lack of creative and new behaviour.
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what exactly prevents them from giving me a dropdown with links to apple maps, kagi maps, bing maps and google maps and my choice gets saved to my google account as the default? Instead all they show me is a useless javascript map which is still google maps but I cant do anything useful on it and it's super frustrating trying to get to a map for a place search
To play devils advocate - it costs money to integrate with all the competing map providers and to display them properly on the site. You could think of a plug in approach where map providers integrate themselves, still someone needs to maintain that plug in infra. Nothing is free. And it’s the same story for any kind of service that’s subject to DMA.
Sounds like a paradise. More healthy lifestyle. For most people much of this stuff is unnecessary. If one wants to live life "online", glued a screen digesting garbage and propaganda 24/7, then one can relocate to some country where that's what people do. Chances are, tourists from such countries will want to visit Europe even more.
We are all living in an "online backwater" in case the author hasn't noticed. The web is a sewer of surveillance, marketing and ads. Despite the information access possibilities the internet presents, the distribution of factual information seems to be at an all-time low, at least in the lifetime I am living. I have never seen people who were so detached from commonly shared reality as a result of "search engines and social media sites". To access facual information, cf. marketing and propaganda, worthless opinions, and "AI" generated garbage, one did not and does not need the latest "phone" or "high-performance computer chips". This stuff is not making people smarter. Is it is not making society better.
I would be willing to bet the countries that have the populations that are most reliant on "search engines and social media sites" and "high performance computer chips" are going to have the highest rates of mental illness and other complications that arise from too much screen time, and the lowest test scores. These will be dumbed down, whacked out societies. They will have the worst quality of life.
I was listening to an interview with Jonathan Kanter recently and the interviewer tried to get him to comment on Europe's approach to regulation of "Big Tech". He was hesitant to accept any comparison. But I am confident there are plenty of folks, generally _not people who comment on HN_, who are envious of the direction Europe is taking.
The idea that regulating Apple and Meta, companies that exploit people commercially as they use computers, e.g., as data collection sources and ad targets, is going to contribute to cause "poverty" or deprive Europe of useful networking and computer technology, e.g., the type used for national defense, is absurd.