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> The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point

I'm not sure that's true amongst most large enterprise companies.

> They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job

They could but unfortunately there have only ever been a small handful of European tech companies which got anywhere close to that

Which indicates they are no longer serious about being an AI lab and downgraded themselves to merely being a hosting provider

> the contract workers are the ones taking the

True, OTH it's not obvious that these jobs would even exist in the first place without Uber/etc. since demand has certainly increased

Airbnb maybe, in Europe booking.com seems to have better deals even if they offer similar service to Airbnb these days.

Uber and other ride sharing apps improved UX immensely and still are cheaper for consumers than regular taxes.

> their monopoly position to maximize money extraction.

Neither AirBnB or Uber are anywhere close to being monopolies aside from maybe a few markers that I'm not aware of.

> you cannot hire all your employees as contract workers and deprive them of their benefits

For employees yeah, pay and conditions are not great compared to normal taxi drivers OTH the demand is higher and there are more "jobs" on aggregate.

> Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.

True. Does not mean all regulation is increases competition and marker efficiency by default. If anything EU has long abandoned the core tenets of Ordoliberalism and "Social Market Economy"

There is regulation that is effective and useful (e.g. plenty of consumer protection laws) and regulation that actually makes markets more competitive and efficient. Then there is a lot of what EU is doing which leads to less efficient markets and more stagnation.

Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.

> once they're good enough for coding aid

The gap has only been increasing, though. Devstral 2 was obviously not great compared to Claude/GPT but kind of acceptable if you were willing to compromise. There has been no real progress since then and frontier labs are massively ahead.

Apple is in an entirely different market than Mistral (consumer electronics vs AI lab focusing on enterprise consulting). Which obviously means their optimal strategies are different. It doesn't really matter for Apple if it's Gemini or other model running behind their AI features. If anything it saves them a lot of money and provides a lot of flexibility.

Realistically they will have to deploy the Chinese models or their finetuned versions though since their models are completely out of date and not competitive. Outside of maybe government contracts it will be hard to compete against Azure/AWS who promise to run their models in EU datacenters and not store any data since actual companies normally prefer frontier models with decent performance (cost/performance is pretty decent as well if you are fine with e.g. Luna which is massively better than anything Mistral can offer).

Or it's "normal" market segmentation. OpenRouter users are more price sensitive in general, also a lot of enterprise users who can't switch easily are using the official API (or Bedrock or Azure) and you want to squeeze them as much as you can.

> Opus or Sol in our use cases, with a fraction of the price.

I assume it's highly use case dependent, though?

Even before the price cut seems like Sol was price competitive with Kimi

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gpt-5-6-sol-xhig...

And now it should be considerably cheaper

20 perhaps, but just about. Probably not 10 years and certainly not 5 years ago (obviously they are way faster now, but from the perspective of normal users running software designed based on the constraints of the hardware available at the time)

Or people could just stop buying Mars bars and other ultra-processed foods if they feel they are overpriced which would force corporations to adjust their policies. Mars, Nestle, McDonalds etc. will continue increasing prices as long as people keep buying regardless of how much they complain.

The pricing of normal raw food products, produce etc. is generally quite transparent.

The population collapse in New England happened only a couple of years before the Plymouth colony was established though (they didn't have any meaningful contact with the Spanish colonies where it happened in the mid and early 1500s).

Of course probably it took quite a bit more for it to reach the Amazon but it's not like Europeans were that familiar or explore the region that much until the 1800s or so.

Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.

Well Chinnese companies are way more efficient, Deepseek did manage to get quite far with a relatively tiny number of staff and limited funding. Then you have companies like Meta which suck pretty much at everything they (excluding their core business) regardless of how much money they throw at it.

Do you have any evidence to back this claim?

> This is one of the most successful investment companies

It was for a long time. There is not a lot of evidence that's still the case (so far at least but even if the crash comes but its not big enough its not guaranteed they will outperform S&P 500 over a several year period).

It seems like of the most outdated and inflexible indicators that's widely used though? Does not account that a much higher proportion of the US economy might be represented in the stock market and that US service companies are generating massive revenue outside of US (in some cases the majority). That wasn't the case 50 years ago.

Why single out Australia though? I mean one conclusion that can be made from arguments like this is that if you do commit genocide and ethnic cleansing you better go all the way and wipe out the other group 100% so your grand children can avoid any type of ancestor blame or demands for compensation (like in plenty of other countries like Turkey etc.)

In plenty of cases it's absolutely self evident (especially when there are plenty of historical precedents for similar or analogous situations).

Yes you can get involved in extended arguments with people arguing in bad faith or whose world view is fundamentally incompatible with your but that's usually just a waste of time (I mean you wouldn't argue with Nazis either just the same as with people trying to institute a Stasi style surveillance apparatus through slow boiling)

What if the majority of the ancestors of some individual Anglo Saxon Australians immigrated in the 1980s. Do they have a moral and legal obligation to personally contribute to this? What about Italian Australians? Or Irish Australians? Are the exempt? I mean it's a stupid biased loaded question to begin with (i.e. attributing collective blame to a undefinable ethic/racial group)..

Slippery slope is not a "fallacy" by default. It can be occasionally but its a perfectly reasonably argument in plenty of cases.

No? I don't think there is a way to meaningfully change the layout for non trivial charts?

Globally in relative terms? Kind of. Sure the gap to the US was huge but it still controlled pretty much entire Africa and much of Asia (with China and Japan obviously not doing great..)

> But at a fundamental level, the S&P500 index exists to track the market

No, it exists to track a subset of the market based on specific criteria and weights. It's not even based on the market cap of included companies directly.

'S&P Total Market Index' exists to track the market.

> qualify as major members of the index

Not based on the inclusion criteria.

AND even if that were changed they wouldn't be near the top anyway, despite the trillion dollar valuations initially they wouldn't even be in the top 20 by weight.

> and defeats the purpose of the index entirely.

The index has operated based on specific rules defining inclusion criteria for a while. Can we just conclude that it did not become the most popular index despite never being designed to track the full market or be based directly on total market caps.

After all it's the people advocating the inclusion of these companies are advocating an arbitrary modification to the rules just to get them in.

Assuming it's share price does not drop significantly because of that.

> what an index describes vs what investors prefer

What makes you think S&P 500 did not become the most popular index (instead of full market ones) because of the rigid entry criteria and and rules for weights.

Amongst other things the weighting is not even based on the market cap.

> The 409a has a lot of words and numbers to justify a particular valuation

That's tangential. The valuation is based on supply and demand, nothing else.

Amongst other things the supply part of the equation will be low because all these companies are only to make a very small proportion of their shares available on the public markets.

> The purpose of an index is to provide a benchmark of the market

Usually a subset of the market based on specific criteria. Total market indexes and funds exist, maybe there is a reason S&P 500 despite its "strict" inclusion criteria is more popular than them?