balarjin

The "double check" mechanism for medications is: We tell people not to take medical advice from anyone who is not trained in medicine.

This is not a new problem. The internet has been full of nonsense since the 1990s (at least). Gossip and malicious rumors are as old as language.

It is not realistic to stop the generation of nonsense (of the malicious or the stupid sort). We should train people to detect and ignore nonsense when they hear it.

Google is an information technology company. They build information technology, and use it to make money. This is in contrast to an ad agency that uses other people's software to sell ads. That company doesn't create technology.

If an oil company creates new technology to extract oil, then they are (obviously) a technology company. If an oil company outsources all technology development, they are not.

> There is no viable third platform.

There is no "viable third platform" because people don't vote against the two existing ones with their wallets.

Can you name an example where a government succeeded in breaking up a monopoly, and the result was better for consumers? AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft were all "broken up", but it didn't make a difference for consumers. In every case, a competitor forced them to change their ways.

In what sense are they shitty? They are actually usable by normal people. This is a big reason they are popular.

I don't like (most of) the content on those sites. This is not surprising. The content is aimed at people who can't use Signal. Such a person is different from me in many ways.

Apparently, activists need something that is "open, decentralized, and user controlled". Those activists choose to use facebook. That tells me they are at least one of two things:

1. Too stupid to make a plan that could possibly work

2. Too lazy to execute on a plan that could possibly work

Knowing this is a useful signal. It tells me their judgment is terrible, and I should not listen to them ;)

> Is it really that hard to allow only legal immigration and stop giving incentives to illegal immigrants?

Illegal immigrants are a source of cheap labor. Business interests tell politicians that without a pool of cheap workers, costs will go up, voters will feel inflation, and the politicians will get the blame.

The overall cost is not low. Some illegal immigrants get benefits. Some illegal immigrants commit crimes. Almost all illegal immigrants will use the healthcare system eventually. But those costs are not seen by the businesses that push illegal immigration.

The US has one immigration system for honest law-following people (Visas, green cards, etc.) and a second system for people who don't follow rules (walk in from Mexico, overstay a Visa, etc.)

Fair enough, it should be asked in a neutral way.

"Voters perceive problems. As is common in a democracy, voters elect people who propose solutions. Why is no other political party proposing solutions voters see as worth voting for?"

If you don't think the problems are real, make the case to the voters.

As far as I can tell, other political parties have no better answer than name-calling. Am I missing some politician/party that is actually making a real argument?

What is the "far-right" far from?

In normal English, it would be from the average (median) voter. A party is "far-right" (or "far-left") if it is substantially to the right (left) of the average voter.

Assume that people vote for the person/party closest to their own view on an issue. 44% of voters choose the far-right candidate, meaning 44% of voters are closer to the far-right candidate than any other option.

How can this happen? Several ways, but only one is realistic: the other candidates are even farther away (to the left or right) from the position of the median voter. 40%+ of voters are themselves "far-right".

> The Nazi party got 37% of votes nationwide (not just in one state).

The Nazi party was not that far to the right of the median German voter at the time.

The far-left is using scary words ("Nazi", "Far-right", etc.) to tar a group they dislike (see what I did there?) They are counting on the fact that most voters can be influenced by group-think and name-calling. They are probably correct. But this is Hacker News, and the people here ought to be smart enough to see this for the stupid political smear that it obviously is. If you don't like a party, make the case that their policy is wrong. If vague analogy to the Nazis is the best argument you have, then you have no argument at all.

> If you have extra cash and cannot spend it on your own business, you can just pay dividends to the shareholders.

That is an option. It is usually not the best option.

Dividends are taxed. You are forcing shareholders to pay a good chunk of money in taxes.

Suppose Nvidia decides not to hedge the risk that competing products eat into their margins. Some years they get lucky and are flush with revenue. Other years they have much lower revenue.

Even in bad years, they want to keep paying to make future products. Cutting employee pay or mass firings would break their engineering org. To avoid that, they would need enough cash on hand to survive several bad years. Now they can't pay dividends because they need this extra buffer of cash! Hedging is a better deal for everyone.

> The shareholders are free to invest in competing businesses.

OpenAI is not (yet) public. Most Nvidia shareholders can't choose to hedge risk by buying shares in OpenAI, or any similar company (they are all private or a small part of a bigger public business).

A given company may or may not be organized this way.

IBM had a system of "blue dollars". If the server group sells a computer, it gets revenue ("green dollars", i.e. real money). The leaders of the server group are credited some fraction of the real money as "blue dollars", which they can give to teams that enabled their success. For example, if sales are being won based on a new feature of the XLC compiler, the server group leads would recognize them by sending their blue dollars to the XLC compiler team. Teams choose what to do (and whose problems to solve) to maximize the amount of blue dollars they can get. Promotions and pay go to people who drive blue dollar "revenue" for their team.

Why does IBM work this way? It is too big to be centrally planned: If the compiler team does amazing work, and the engineers get no credit, all the smart and hardworking engineers leave. The central planners in Armonk re-invented a market economy to figure out what work matters and reward it.

Mcdonald's famously invested in Chipotle as a risk mitigation strategy. If consumers want healthier fast food, sales at Mcdonald's will go down, and sales at Chipotle will go up. Investing in something anti-correlated with your business lowers risk by paying you when your own business is hurt by a surprise.

If you can see the future, by all means invest in the one stock that will go up the most. If you can't see the future, diversifying into assets that have negative correlation (one goes up if the other goes down) lowers volatility at the cost of limiting possible upside.

Nvidia has a massive pile of money. Where should they invest? If they believe in what OpenAI is doing, investing in it makes sense no matter what hardware OpenAI chooses. If OpenAI manages to make something much better than Nvidia hardware, Nvidia's sales will go down as the value of OpenAI goes (way) up. If OpenAI fails to make something as good as Nvidia hardware, they buy Nvidia hardware.

It is odd how internet commentators seem to think that companies make investment decisions as a way to root for a team. They do not. That is not how finance professionals think!