notSupplied

Games should ask users to chip in to their Facebook marketing budgets. Cost offset is revenue earned!

What if the phone is in the hands of millions of people in the first place because it is full of apps? Didn’t the Mac cede it’s place in PC history because Windows had more software?

You raise an interesting point here:

Who has the burden of proof here? Should disparity in SIM card ownership be proven? Or the fact that they are evenly distributed be proven? Few things in life are evenly distributed, disparity is the norm!

If I were a congressman and had a shot at grilling Apple 2 weeks ago, I would have said this to them:

--- I was a Mac user and an Apple fan in the 90s and early 2000s, and we all know that was a rough time to be a Mac user: Because it was clear that Windows had won. If you asked a typical PC buyer why they chose Windows, their answer would go something like this: "All the software I need is on Windows. Windows has the REAL version of Office. Windows has IE6, the REAL internet. Windows has all my games, and my work software." Like the iPhone, the Mac was technologically superior in many ways, but that did not stop the Mac from shrinking to only a 5% market share, ceding its place in PC history to Windows.

Today, the iPhone enjoys the breadth of 3rd party software the Mac could only dream of. People pay $1000, sometimes every year, for a phone! This has transformed Apple's fortune from a struggling company into the most valuable company in the world. Why are people willing to pay so much for a phone? Because it is so much more than a phone. And why is it so much more than a phone? Because of the all 3rd party software expanding what the smartphone could do beyond what anyone thought was possible. So, why on earth would you put a tax on something that helps you so much, that it likely made the difference between being the distant loser in the PC era, vs being one of two major winners in the smartphone era? ---

There's a lot of different angles people arguing about this, but this is my favorite: Which is that the FLOW OF VALUE GOES BOTH WAYS. I find the tone that Apple takes on this arrogant: They really believe they are doing developers this huge favor by creating the iPhone and the AppStore and the flow of value flows massively in one direction, from Apple-to-Developer. But I sincerely do believe that 3rd party software is what made the difference between the fate of the Mac and the fate of the iPhone, and the respective difference in Apple's fortune. For as much as one could gush about iPhone's incredible hardware and software lead, the Mac had those same things going for it and still lost to Windows because of the software.

For Apple to turn around an rent-seek against one of the core reasons why the iPhone is successful, is to me, an incredible betrayal, and made possible only because of the gross difference in power and market concentration.

Yes, China very selectively bans American companies, just as the US is now very selectively banning the same types of companies. It’s just Mercantilism: be open in all ways except the key industries you wish to develop domestically. I don’t think mercantilism is fundamentally evil (it’s how Japan and South Korea became wealthy first world nations at certain American industries expense) but don’t cry when your trade partners bite back.

If you haven't read "Liking What You See", a short story by Ted Chiang, do yourself a favor and check it out. It is one of the most interesting works of fiction focused entirely on this subject. It is part of the book "Stories of Your Life and Others".

"Ideally the money should come from the elite class that is accumulating the capital thanks to automation and monopolization."

Have you done the math on this? The scale of UBI is so large that it has to mostly come from the middle class. A meager $20k UBI for all 300 million Americans would cost $6 trillion. Even if you liquidated the 100% of wealth of the top 400 Americans you'd only get $3 trillion, and you're only able to do that once, not every year.

You've touched on a great point about rent.

The article talks about an overabundance of CONSUMER GOODS, but no amount of deflating TV prices can make up for the fact that Rent, Healthcare, and College is what's putting pressure on the lower and middle class right now. UBI will inflate rent the same way cheap student loans inflate tuition.

He’s not talking about effectively what happens. He’s saying textually there is no “large company tax break” and if you tell legislators to repeal “large company tax breaks” they’d all give you confused looks. Textual precision is important if you want to start fixing the problem. What exactly are the test breaks that work for big companies and not small ones? Why do they exist? What was the original intent? What are the side effects?

This is a really great point. It takes an order of magnitude more energy to come up with a thoughtful rebuttal to this, and when you're done, you'll likely end up with a wall of text that gets TLDR'd. This is why reason loses on Twitter, it takes a Paul Graham level essay to counter even the most basic immflamatory logic.

The thing is, a long wall of text usually reveals how truly eloquent and thoughtful the writer is.

In a mere 280 characters, some random person could sound just as smart as Paul Graham. It is the essays that set them apart, and not easily replicated the by drive-by-reply-guy.

And what happens if China marches into Taiwan? This is a plausible consideration that must be one of Apple's worst nightmares.

People buying $1000 phones are on the upscale range, who would likely be in the PC gaming category if they gamed. Consoles are priced for the mid budget consumer who likely own $600 phones. On top of that, the price-tag of the phone is an amalgamation of several devices into one. The smartphone is so valuable people are willing to pay cost+margins on it and it STILL fully saturates society. The console unfortunately is not that.

The subsidized console increases the total user base by lowering the up front price hurdle. So you’re comparing a world with a small TAM, expensive consoles, cheaper games, vs a world with a large a TAM, artificially cheap consoles, and more expensive games.

I think both game devs and console makers prefer the big-TAM world.

Not necessarily "bad".

Font rendering on macOS is more "authentic" to the original shape at the expense of clarity from hinting/pixel-snapping.

I'm starting to wonder whether "for a good cause" is exactly the reason why this is happening. People are mistakenly believing that as long as the ends are just, the means couldn't possibly be wrong.

More people should do what you do when judging others.

On your last point: This is what I fear most as well, a permanent radicalization of this individual.

One important principle in management is that you must be extremely careful NEVER to humiliate someone in even the slightest way in front of audience (any meeting >3 people by my book). The mere suggestion that "something didn't go well" can trigger extremely hurt feelings, defensiveness, and antipathy depending on the size of the audience.

Well on the internet, everything occurs in front of potentially infinitely large audience. To admit that you are wrong is to endure humiliation before the whole world. To deal with this, people dig in their heals, and claim that "I was always right, and those who disagree with me are not only wrong and stupid, but evil to the highest degree."

It's heartbreaking watching watching the far left stab their nearest ideological neighbors and most important allies.

"He stood up for his principles" is an incorrect abstraction of what happened.

Huge difference between "I'm waving the BLM flag because I believe in it." vs "Hey look everyone, Pryce refused wave the same flag as I do, get the pitchforks!"

The other developer, for all we know, could be in total agreement with BLM!

Why would we need to incentivize creating more legislative annotations?

If you look at the rules, that is exactly what they are doing. If you provide a form of 3rd party login that isn’t the following things: (...list of sign ins that are all not the kind of “Sign in with Facebook / Google”, you are exempt.

So it seems pretty targeted:apps that provide FB or Google sign in must also provide Apple sign in, which has an anonymous option.

As a user I’m loving this. Worrysome use of AppStore power aside...

Folks should really read this article to get more context on Kickstarter's history with unionization, it is truly bananas and not what you think:

https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/kickstarter-turmoil-uni...

- The first thing that jumped out at me was that the primary spark of conflict was NOT compensation or working conditions.

- The main conflict was around a Kickstarter project "Always Punch Nazis", a project that gathered a few laughs among Kickstarter's largely liberal staff + management. When they faced right-wing political pressure to de-platform this project, since it technically violates their "do not incite violence" ToS, it triggered a ideological schism within the company.

- Unionization seems to be largely about placing this kind of decision in the hands of the employees. This is somewhat consistent with Kickstarter's history of activism.

- However, it's pretty uncharted territory here: Unionization that is not primarily motivated by distribution of wealth, but for the political soul of the company.

My question to you is why do you choose to prioritize that problem?

Yes, $70 million to the execs while many earn minimum wage sure does sound awful. But like OP says, even if you achieved resounding success in eliminating this inequality, it translates to a $32/yr raise. That rounds down to zero in terms of improvement in prosperity.

Isn't prosperity of the rest what we really ought to care about? It seems an awfully lot like focusing on the cosmetically ugliest problem that doesn't really move the needle.

It would at least least disperse the risk from "don't hire women of a certain age" to "don't hire people of a certain age" which I think is a win on the margin.

Anti-trust hasn't changed much legislatively in the past few decades. While the laws haven’t changed much on paper, what’s changed is simply the level of enforcement. We still have the same laws that barred IBM from dominating personal computers (creating the opening for Microsoft) but we simply don’t pursue as much enforcement.

One problem with diminishing enforcement is that whenever you DO pursue enforcement action, it will inevitably look extremely political.

The worst is when I accidentally sub-verbalize a speculatively executed conversation branch, leaking information I didn't intend to.

This is why manufacturers wish they could set the price and prevent retailers from undercutting like this. That regulatory battle is long lost, so I think we end up with an environment that sacrifices service for price.

A seed investment has the dim hope of "10-100Xing", a loan at best gets repaid with interest.

This is Jevon's Paradox of software development.

As self driving cars enable us to fit far more cars on the road before causing the same level of congestion, people will start taking increasingly longer car rides for decreasingly valuable reasons, up until the roads are equally intolerable as they were before the innovation had occured.

Replace "self driving cars" with "faster hardware / more memory".

"The pvp is a non-stop sweat fest of me getting killed over and over and over and over"

Isn't this an argument for skill-based matchmaking rather than against it? (Since the OP whom you agree with makes a case against optimizing for SBMM, I presume you're also against it)

They have no choice but to be ruthless & calculating because it takes far longer to communicate (multiple round trips @ light speed) and establish what kind of relationship you're going to have with that other civilization, rather than sending a photoid/foil over. This is why the early history of the universe was described as "Edenic", because communication then would have been nearly instantaneous and Dark Forest may not have applied then.