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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

2% of (nominal) US GDP! If Apple were a country, it would rank in the top 30.

Sure, but Apple books revenue gross and a lot of it is from components they buy from other people in other countries, which would be excluded from a GDP calculation.

An extreme similar example of this is Mckesson [0], which does $260bn of revenue a year (mostly buying pills from pharma companies and re-selling them to pharmacies) but only $11bn of gross profit, since they spend $250bn/year just buying those pills.

[0]https://www.mckesson.com/About-McKesson/Newsroom/Press-Relea...

'only' for a middleman, who doesn't even do the bare minimum job of saying: hey, we're shipping more opiate pills to this zip code every month than there are people x 100

Of all the links in the chain for the Opiate Crisis, you're going to blame the distributor of the pills?

I get it, hindsight in 20/20 etc., but those pills were prescribed by highly-trained doctors and fulfilled by highly-trained pharmacists who thought they were doing the right thing and you expect some non-M.D. to have the foresight and understanding to say 'Sure, CVS is ordering this amount from us because they have this many pharmacist-approved scripts (keep in mind, this is one of thousands of items CVS is ordering), but I think something is fishy.'

It just seems like that expectation diffuses blame from the actual villains here (the pharma companies that specifically worked to manipulate pharmacists and doctors into writing/approving those scripts).

there were HUGE amounts of MDs purposefully not doing the right thing and running pill mills.

And yeah, distributors for sure have experts and resources to hire experts. And they were repeatedly warned/directed to stop the insane volume. They knew of this. They weren't ignorant, even on purpose.

The opiate lobbyists slyly got the law changed so the DEA couldn't enforce with stop notices.

IIRC In Gibney's documentary they interviewed some of the Congresspeople who voted for it and they thought the bill did the opposite.

pharmacists also had the right to refuse and some did! but Purdue often intervened and pressured them to fill the scripts. I think that was shown either in gibney or maybe the great hulu purdue miniseries?

wapo "THE DRUG INDUSTRY’S TRIUMPH OVER THE DEA"

https://archive.ph/VYOeM

Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about Apple and FAANG and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and SpaceX/Tesla, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States.

That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.

You mean AAG? :) both Facebook and Netflix have slid dramatically from their prior glory.

There's an argument to be made for one or all of Microsoft, Tesla, and Google to be included in there (I'm not calling them Alphabet and I'm not calling Facebook Meta I don't care how much you pay me).

If only one of the company names started with the letter E, then we could make the meta-joke of META standing for Meta, E*, Tesla, Alphabet.

E Corp

The current nomenclature is Microsoft-Apple-Google-Amazon (MAGA).

I guess they really are making America great again /s

I'd prefer GAMA ;)

Facebook is a value stock now, not a high-growth exciting company.

Why would you include Tesla in there?

They've got a huge market cap at an absurd P/E ratio, but they don't have anything approaching a huge market share of vehicles, quick search shows 19% of the EV market, which is only 10-20% of the overall vehicle market.

Google is Alphabet, just call it AAA.

Which is what I feel like yelling when I remember how much power just those three companies wield over everyone’s lives.

With Netflix sliding dramatically, it has become MAMAA.

MAMAA: Microsoft. Apple. Meta. Amazon. Alphabet

> I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.

It's not an accident.

they aren't any of those, they're Irish, and that's no accident either.

uhhhhhhhh whaaat? this has such a limited worldview. you can form companies in any of those places regardless of your citizenship or even residency, you can start companies in the US regardless of your citizenship or residency, you can get access to the speculative fury and cheap capital on Wall Street without you or your company being domiciled in the US. All combinations are possible and you need all combinations to make that magic happen.

Choosing to do this with a US nexus for most purposes was intentional and helped this outcome.

For an example of this combination. Baidu is a chinese search engine and advertising platform.

It is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, its board members and management are several US citizens living in the US, several are Chinese. Its primary operations are in China with several subsidiaries in other countries. The shares are repackaged as foreign depository receipts to trade on the US Nasdaq. And also trades on a Hong Kong exchange as of 2021.

You only limit yourself with this kind of nationalism.

The chosen regulatory environment does affect the potential size of the business. Its a choice for the company, and the management. A low growth French or German company chooses to stay in France or Germany.

US has lot of advantages, a huge single market, strong currency, startup culture, low corruption, almost good justice system.

World's biggest moat and a general lack of big, angry neighbors.

I see you've never met a Canadian.

(sorry! sorry, as someone from MN, I'm sorry Canada! don't hurt me)

Does it help the average American that they are a US company? Big companies lobby and push hard politically, and they aren’t usually pushing for the best interests of Jane and Jo Average.

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