> Why doesn't the monopoly employ the same cost-saving measures for even bigger margins?
They would.
The issue is that competition alone wouldn't fix it, because there is an information deficit. Some people will pick the lowest price and not realize that the ISP offering it is taking kickbacks from incumbent services to degrade their own competitors. And since this is always bad -- it's anti-competitive in the market for over-the-top services, so this is an anti-trust rule -- it should be prohibited regardless of whether there is competition in the ISP market. Because you need it in order to preserve competition in the markets for other services.
Except I live in one of the places that has widespread competition (Utah) and can pick from one of dozens of Fiber Internet providers, including some that can provide 10Gbps service, a cable company, and even technically Starlink.
How many of them are throttling content to prevent competition in this hypothetical anti-net neutrality scenario? Exactly zero.
Which is evidence to me that Net Neutrality is a sham, what more people need is a free market. Not another government monopoly with some regulations slapped on.
They're two independent things. You can still require network neutrality in a competitive market with multiple providers.
Whether a market would converge on providers violating network neutrality depends on the characteristics of the market and its customers etc. But if nobody would have violated it anyway, what's the benefit of not having the law? Whereas if you don't have the law and do have violations, that's bad.
How competative was the isp market in Utah before Google fiber subsidized the massive build-out?
Google threw in the towel on wiring more new cities about mid-way through the SLC build, which makes need think perhaps the biggest obstacle to your thesis bearing fruit, is upfront infrastructure investments…
Google all but abandoned Utah, as soon as we got municipal fiber in most cities (Utopia). Utopia was built out by government issued bonds and shares 0 physical infrastructure with Google. Google refused to participate in the program, because they didn’t like the idea of dark fiber where anyone could “choose a provider”.
Google wanted a monopoly.
The nice thing is that they can properly screw off, because now we have dozens of better options where I’m supporting the little guy instead of Silicon Valley Big Tech.
I live on (presumedly) the other side of Utah, right by the Arizona border, and we have no competition — a single real option. It’s the best, fastest, most reliable, and cheapest internet connection I’ve had access to in my life. What’s the lesson from this? No idea. There are some good companies out there I guess?
Transparency is part of the problem. It makes the anti-competitive practice easier to carry out because customers don't know they're getting screwed. But there's still a potential anti-trust issue even with perfect information.
Suppose Facebook doesn't want anyone using their competitors, so they subsidize the cost on some ISPs that then block their competitors. The customers of those ISPs are 15% of the market, and they know the other competitors are blocked, but they want the discount. Then the other 85% of people have to use Facebook in order to communicate with anyone on one of those ISPs, and social networks have a network effect, so now everybody is stuck on Facebook even if they don't use one of those ISPs, because they know somebody who does. This is anti-competitive and so an anti-trust problem.
I think it's much more likely people stop using Facebook in that condition. People may be "stuck" with Meta because everyone is on it but the situation you're describing is a big difference between zero friction to make an account and join everybody else and change your ISP so you can talk to your grandma and look at cats on instagram.
I'd rather have choice and transparency and see if the situation you've described arises. It sounds completely unrealistic to me and we don't have to make laws and regulations cover every single edge case right away, they can be modified as we go.
You've failed to understand the example. Nobody would have to change ISPs to use Facebook because Facebook paid off the ISPs for some form of exclusivity. It is Facebook's competitors who would struggle wity user acquisition because not only do you have to convince users to change ISPs to use your competing platform, but you have to convince all your frienda and family to switch too if you wanna be able to call them.
> It sounds completely unrealistic
You are incredibly naive then. This sort of thing regularly happens all around the you. Kickbacks, exclusivity and companies colluding for competitive advantage is commonplace, not unrealistic.
Transparancy (at least how I see it) is matter of culture.
For example, if you open up ISP accounting books to the public, creative people will find ways to hide things. Instead of line item “10M € kickback from facebook”, there will be “10M € sale to facebook”.
I’d say the exact opposite. It’s clear the majority of customers here cannot make an informed decision either by way of incompetence about the technical aspects that would enable them to detect bad faith behavior on the part of ISPs, or lack of transparency, or outright lack of competition in their market. Competition does not work to increase quality if the customer cannot judge it. The entire benefits of markets and competition break down and become irrelevant.
Instead: make it a utility, subject to regulation and codes as any other. I don’t need to be a plumber to ensure I get adequate sewer service, I don’t need to be an electrician to ensure that I get adequate electrical service, why should I need to be sysadmin to make sure I get adequate network service? It makes no sense. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it makes even less sense because those examples require less education overall than you would to detect bad faith behavior on the part of your ISP. if you don’t have enough water pressure for your shower to function, you don’t need to be a plumber to diagnose that. If your homes electrical service is so bad that you can’t run your appliances you don’t need to be an electrician to judge that. But how do you know if your given ISP is throttling Netflix without substantial IT in your background?
I don’t think it’s an outrageous opinion that any Tom, Dick, or Harry, who is participating in this market should be able to get the service to a reasonable standard of quality that they are paying for without needing to verify it independently.
> It’s clear the majority of customers here cannot make an informed decision either by way of incompetence about the technical aspects that would enable them to detect bad faith behavior on the part of ISPs
Unfortunately, if consumers can’t make an informed decision, then there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the government, which is full of technically incompetent bureaucrats, is going to somehow make the right decision for them.
I’d sooner trust an average 15 year old to regulate the Internet than literally any elected politician or professional lobbyist.
> Unfortunately, if consumers can’t make an informed decision, then there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the government, which is full of technically incompetent bureaucrats, is going to somehow make the right decision for them.
This is such utterly brain-dead individualist defeatist nonsense that I struggle to respect it as an actual position. Do you believe either the common consumers or the politicians understand vehicles? And like, even the broad topic of vehicles belies several specifics of interest to regulators like emissions and safety features. Of course they don't know all of that. They hire in people qualified to judge the effectiveness of those systems and to write the regulations that will then be enforced by agencies charged with that task.
Is this perfect? Of course not, no human system is or ever will be, but I would argue that based on the overall trajectory from the initial rollout of cars in the 1940's to the average consumer, where we started with brutally primitive machines that would kill people basically all the time, both pedestrians and their drivers/passengers, that spewed black vile smoke out of completely audio and emission unmitigated exhausts and were utterly terrifying at even their comparatively low speeds, all the way until today, when you can, as a consumer, purchase a car that manages it's own emissions within the bounds of reason, has numerous safety features to keep you alive, and can safely travel at speeds that well exceed the maximums posted on any highway without utterly flying apart, as an original Model T probably would have attempting half that speed, and you can do that all without knowing fuck shit about cars, ensured of the fact that you will get at least a decent product that will not harm you if used properly? That seems to me to be overall, quite an effective regulatory atmosphere. Not perfect, again, but quite effective. And that regulatory market is broadly practiced every day for probably hundreds if not thousands of products you have purchased without a second thought, because you don't need to think about them, because government agencies you know nothing about are working to ensure the safety of that market.
We have had this shit figured out for almost a century I would say. The fact that ISPs now operate such an utterly critical resource for our daily lives with near total absence of regulation in terms of the product they deliver, the quality of it, the usability, etc. etc. is frankly ludicrous. We're sitting here having arguments about which ISP throttles which sites worse and how to avoid them, when the solution is clearly: Do not give them the fucking option to throttle any website. If you pay for your Internet service, you should be able to access Netflix, YouTube, Mega filesharing, 4chan, Imgur and fuckin PornHub at will with zero thought to the notion that any of them will perform any worse than any other because they didn't put together a sweetheart deal with your fucking cable company.
> Do not give them the fucking option to throttle any website. If you pay for your Internet service
The problem with that statement is, like anything else imagined by bureaucrats, is divorced from reality. Hence my point that I wouldn’t trust the government to regulate the Internet.
Internet providers peer with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other networks. They do so in some cases by paying money, but in most cases through something called settlement free peering, which came out of mutually beneficial agreements to connect at perking exchanges. In all cases providers have avoided passing the costs down to consumers, even though the economics are incredibly complex.
IMHO Leave it to the experts. No one is paying a special fee to access 4chan or Netflix. It’s a big fat, widely disproven lie that proponents of net neutrality made up and have been arguing for nearly 15 years now, one that never came to pass.
The only reason utilities are regulated are because they are natural monopoly. It doesn’t make sense to have more than one utility company with right of way to dig up streets to create the needed infrastructure.
To an extent, cellular is a natural oligopoly. Each carrier needs enough spectrum to have decent service. But it isn’t a monopoly.
> To an extent, cellular is a natural oligopoly. Each carrier needs enough spectrum to have decent service. But it isn’t a monopoly.
It's a natural monopoly in exactly the same way any other utility is. "It doesn't make sense to have more than one utility build towers everywhere to create the needed infrastructure." In theory if only one company did it you would only need one set of towers and costs would be lower. But a private monopoly doesn't exactly optimize costs either, and some utilities cost more to duplicate than others. It's much more expensive to have redundant roads than redundant cables running along the same set of utility poles or in the same cable trench, and cell towers are on that end of the range.
The spectrum is a red herring. You could operate live auctions to bid on spectrum in real time in areas of scarcity instead of allocating it permanently to particular companies. This would also give companies the incentive to operate more towers at lower power levels, because you'd only need to bid on spectrum in the same collision domain and lower power levels would cause that to be smaller areas with less contention, lowering their spectrum costs.
Do you realize how complicated that would make both the phones and leaving an area? Besides, even today some phones only operate over certain parts of the spectrum and some parts of the spectrum aren’t even conducive to transmitting through walls - the issue T-Mobile had for years.
The only reason why anything is regulated is because society decided that the consequences of not regulating it produce undesirable outcomes for too many people in said society.
This is decidedly the case with ISPs today, so arguments over the pedantic definition of monopolies and whether it applies here are rather irrelevant.
Yes because something that will literally kill you if there aren’t standards is analogous to net neutrality.
But even if it were, it’s #199542 why HN commenters don’t understand what a “monopoly” is and why utilities that require physical infrastructure which are natural monopolies aren’t the same as cellular where there are three healthy competitors.
And some people will pick the ISP where Disney's subsidizing the subscription to make Netflix look bad, and not care because they're only using the connection for SSH terminals and email.
Don't assume that people only pick these plans because they're uninformed.
The informed customers aren't the issue. If Disney is paying to make Netflix look bad, it's because somebody is getting fooled into thinking Netflix is to blame for this, otherwise what is Disney getting for their money? So that plan is an anti-competitive measure, regardless of whether it also presents an arbitrage opportunity for customers who don't care about video streaming. If its only customers were the arbitrageurs then Disney would have no reason to pay and it wouldn't exist.
> Some people will pick the lowest price and not realize that the ISP offering it is taking kickbacks from incumbent services to degrade their own competitors
> And some people will pick the ISP where Disney's subsidizing the subscription to make Netflix look bad, and not care because they're only using the connection for SSH terminals and email
It seems unlikely that there are anywhere close to as many of the latter as the former
No no, he is rich so of course he is just a kid, lost in the sauce, accidentally squandering a few billion. Now, 16 year old male from a low income household, those are men, and should know the consequence of their actions better. /s
This infantilizing is disgusting propaganda in and of itself.
It's not really propaganda, I think it popped up mostly because typical finance leaders are seen as being on the older side. As a Patrick Boyle video on the issue had put it, they had barely been in finance long enough to be trusted with the morning coffee run.
"Kid" is meant to be derogatory, highlighting the absurdity of traditional investors trusting openly irresponsible people with such little experience in such a heavily experience and regulation dependent field like finance. They behaved like spoiled children, with all the drugs and sex going around within the company, gaming while talking to investors etc. It doesn't make SBF look better.
Finance is about money, that's going to attract some people that are motivated purely by money. That's a bad thing and the culture in any institution should discourage this.
Yet at the same time finance is a big industry, there's plenty of honest, hardworking people that do their 9 to 5 (or more realistically 8 to 7) and go home to their kids. Finance has bad apples (just like tech) but I don't think we should write off the entire industry for that.
I'm learning his age in this thread and pretty surprised. I would have pegged him as being in his late twenties. I think stuff like his haircut, his general attitude, the league of legends thing, all contribute to making him seem younger than he his.
There's not many years difference between "late 20s" and 32. 3 years, if we set our benchmark at 29. As someone in their early 30s themself, do I consider myself much more mature or experienced than I was a few years ago? Not really; my life is in a better place, but that's because of factors that are kind of orthogonal to maturity.
I think your criticism is unfair. I didn't know how biological age, and I thought he was probably in his early-mid 20s. Not because he's rich and white, but because he acts, dresses, and cuts his hair like an emotionally immature boy genius right out of college.
A few of us wear suit jackets now, but I think that's just to stand out from the crowds of jeans and t-shirts that became my generation's accidental dress code.
(Though perhaps I'm just projecting; on the rare occasions I wear a suit jacket, that's what I'm thinking).
oh it was no accident. it took a lot of determined laziness and disregard for the casual Friday corporate culture BS by smarter than most people to change to rules.. band shirts, cargo shorts and skate shoes beats button downs, khakis, and leather loafers all day err day. got a not so casual work event to attend? bust out the nice grateful dead shirt, black zip up hoodie, and the jeans without the holes, and own it hard
1) blazers, specifically, are awesome, they’re wearable purses that also make you look sharper. They’re a superior version of the open button-up shirt I’d wear in high school because it was trendy back then and which also had (less well-realized) utility and useful-in-a-pinch value, and
2) loafers are the best shoe for everyday not-very-active stuff, and it’s not a close call. Slip on! It’s insane that they’re considered even a little dressy. A small miracle.
Except if you're an active person. Blazers don't give you full range of arm motion unless they are laughable baggy or made of some weird stretch material that looks cheap. Loafers are sub-optimal for running up stairs, catching the train/bus that's about to leave, or moving heavy things.
> The students were also shown photographs alongside descriptions of various crimes and asked to assess the age and innocence of white, black or Latino boys ages 10 to 17. The students overestimated the age of blacks by an average of 4.5 years and found them more culpable than whites or Latinos, particularly when the boys were matched with serious crimes, the study found
He's a full grown adult, who was trusted with billions of dollars, and worked with other full grown adults, who aided in his crimes.
Calling him a kid implies that he wasn't fully in control of his actions and shouldn't be held accountable to the same level as an adult would, and that's ridiculous.
> Bitcoin replaces these things with servers and decentralization.
This is totally absurd. We would still need police and military even if the USD stopped existing and we switched over to Bitcoin. You cannot replace them with servers because servers can't protect a nation or enforce laws.
> The fact they do other things is not important.
It is important, because it means they must exist anyway. So it makes no sense to factor in their cost if the cost would still need to be paid regardless of which financial system we use.
I don't think so. It's not like we have a branch of the military dedicated solely to maintaining the dominance of the USD. It protects our national security interests as a whole. The fact that it also scares everyone into using the dollar is just a bonus.
And while there are police dedicated to investigating financial crimes involving dollars today, we would still have them. They'd just be investigating crimes involving BTC.
> It protects our national security interests as a whole.
The emphasis of those interests is on ensuring that the US remains the dominant global superpower, particularly economically. Only a modest portion of our "defense" spending actually goes toward defending our own territory; most of it goes toward global force projection.
> And while there are police dedicated to investigating financial crimes involving dollars today, we would still have them. They'd just be investigating crimes involving BTC.
A lot of avenues for financial crime become impossible in a post-dollar world, and said world doesn't really introduce any new avenues compared to cash; that's a strict reduction, and therefore a strict reduction in the need for police on that front.
There's also a considerable reduction in demand for police to investigate robberies when there's a lot less to rob. Banks get reduced to loan centers and safe deposit boxes, armored trucks moving cash around stop being a thing, nothing in cash registers to steal at gunpoint... yeah, criminals will probably try to commit robberies, but will quickly find out that the reward ain't worth the risk.
Police corruption also becomes trickier, especially when it comes to civil asset forfeiture. No cash to steal during traffic stops means less motivation for said traffic stops in the first place.
> The question is will there be a way to mine more difficult problems using less power. That is the only way bitcoin power usages stops growing (slowly).
That's not how it works. The whole point is to spend power (work).
If there was some breakthrough that allowed finding hashes with 10x less electricity, then the network wouldn't burn 10x less electricity. It would instead find 10x more hashes.
The company is worth what it's worth, according to investors, no matter how many slices you piece it up in. If you issue more shares, people will be willing to pay less for each one. Yes, adding cash to the balance sheet increases the book value, but the only way to add that cash is to sell the new shares, and the only way to sell the new shares is to offer them for cheaper than the current asking price.
Put another way, if prospective investors wanted to buy more shares at the current asking price, they could, from an existing owner. The people who want shares but haven't bought, demand a lower price for them.
the company is worth MORE when people buy the new stock shares.
Let's say you have a company worth $2 and you have two shareholders, each with one share. So that's a dollar a share, right? Now you sell a third share for a dollar. The company that was worth $2 is now worth $3 because it has its old assets that were worth $2, and it has NOW has a dollar in cash that it didn't have before. Now it's a $3 company. This is not advanced analysis, this is simple counting. Trust me, I know how it works, I got a graduate degree in it, and you're simply wrong.
what you may be thinking of is when the company issues shares and gives them as incentives/rewards to officers/directors/employees. That does dilute ownership, but sale of shares does not.
> the company is worth MORE when people buy the new stock shares
This is a huge "when" (it should be more of an "if"), and one upon which the entire theory rests. But we can't just assume infinite demand for shares at any price. So: will people buy the new shares, at the current, pre-new-issue price?
No, they won't. The current price is too much for those people to buy shares. If those people wanted shares at the current price, they could buy them from an existing holder. They didn't, indicating they don't want to.
Thus: no people buying the newly-issued shares; means no cash going into the company; means no increase in company value. The company would need to offer less than the current price (thus decreasing the price) in order to get anyone to buy the new shares.
>Let's say [I] have a company worth $2 and [I] have two shareholders, each with one share. So that's a dollar a share, right? Now [I] sell a third share for a dollar (pronouns edited to respond)
Who would you sell it to? Who would buy that share for a dollar? I could have bought it from one of the 2 existing shareholders for a dollar. Offering a third share says to me that you're on shaky financial ground, and that your company is probably worth closer to $0 than $2. In fact, I suspect you might apply my third dollar towards executive compensation, rather than towards increasing the value of the company, and that's why "the company" needs my cash in the first place.
This is basic demand theory: there is no marginal demand for a share of your company at a price of $1. Only 2 people were willing to pay that, and they already did. I bet the new-issue antics are giving them pause, too: they'll probably offload at a loss, if anyone will buy at that point, even for pennies on the dollar. But I'll tell you what: I'll offer you 30 cents. Take it (and lower the share price to 30 cents) or leave it. Trust me, I got two graduate degrees in this ;)
Because the guy is framing his discouragement as "coming from a place of love" when in reality it takes roughly 2-3 weeks to go from zero-to-[LLC accepting payments on Stripe]. Which means it's really not that "fucking hard" at all to start small and begin the search for paying customers.
I've been on this board for 17 years back when it was originally called "Startup News" and full of new-company founders, sold 2 small SW apps back in 2009, and have also done the F100 corporate adventure. The emotional challenges of starting your own company can be easier than the 9-5.
Starting is easy. I don't think the parent you replied to was talking about that procedural part of it. The parent is weighing working for someone or starting a newco.
Also it's a completely different ballgame when you build a company that has employees versus an app.
We don't know what path the parent was talking about or what their business would be. We don't know their financial position.
Regardless, it's hard to build a successful business. Especially on your first attempt.
>when in reality it takes roughly 2-3 weeks to go from zero-to-[LLC accepting payments on Stripe]
okay, now tell my how long and how much it costs to g from new LLC to self-sustainable. Even some of the most popular startups aren't profitable for years.
TL;DR MAME would have to emulate a CRT's electron beam drawing in the original cabinet's direction if it wanted to be spatiotemporally identical. The notion that a cabinet could glitch out and accidentally perfectly emulate MAME beggars belief.
Like you said, I suppose it could happen, in the sense that it wouldn't violate the known laws of physics.
Seems like Mitchell could easily offer the offending cabinet for anybody to examine. But really it seems like there was never any question whether he was going to do that.
I did a quick search and it appears the law sets a minimum of about $20 per hour. So I guess DoorDash considers there to be about 40 minutes of "active time" per hour?
That seems to "match" what I quickly saw. I'm in no way an expert on this, but I did some quick spot checking of what I could find online. From 5-10 screenshots I saw of people's earnings drivers seem to have about 70% or 75% of "dashing time" as active time.
There were exceptions I also saw, someone at 50%, some other people said they were at ~90% although I didn't see screenshots.
I assume this varies heavily by if your in a city or not or how close to meal time it is which I've got no insight into.
And note this could be all entirely wrong - it's people who chose to post their screenshots online so huge risk for selection bias to it being higher paid workers.
What law are you referring to, and a minimum of $20 per hour for what? Wouldn't your interpretation mean I can sign up for DoorDash, keep the app open, never accept a delivery, and be guaranteed $20/hr?
I don't know, but presumably OP is referring to a $20min wage as covering active time, not "dashing" time. The latter means you have the app open and are scheduled to work. Active means you are actively driving to a restaurant, picking up food or dropping it off.
So if you schedule two hours and the app give you no hits, or you decline hits that time wouldn't count.
Now that said, I know nothing about the $20 min wage and can't say if that's accurate or not.
That states they can choose hourly minimum or "or pay per delivery at about 50 cents a minute" which is in line with $29.93 per hour for what DoorDash calls "active" work.
Gather them up into a ball, then flatten them into a new wafer using a rolling pin.