maximus_01

The days of the left being more supportive of free speech than the right are long over

Garbage blog post with no insight beyond copying and pasting some tweets. Clearly has an agenda.

I don't really care for any of the AI providers but for instance the idea that Nvidia is doing what its doing because it think OAI is failing is the exact opposite of what they are doing. Nvidia is scared of an OAI and Anthropic oligopoly, because in that case, their customers will have much more pricing power, and be much more motivated to work around Nvidia (essentially to either substantially reduce nvidia gross margins or replace them). Both companies are already taking actions to do so. So Nvidia is trying to get more competition (hence their support for open source models).

Let’s not forget that Anthropic only paid that to settle a class action lawsuit.

Yep and more like 25%+ of profits (given the google revenue, and most ad revenue, is close to 100% margin).

This is true but airpods is a bad example. They are a runaway success. Estimates are they did around $25bn of revenue in the last year. For context the highest annual revenue Bose ever did was $4bn (since declined). Sonos does something like $1.5bn. If Airpods was a standalone company it would be one of the biggest consumer hardware companies in the world.

Good investment decision and obviously the street was very wrong, but the reason the multiple was low was because of concerns earnings were at risk from a) their issues in China (which they solved, at least for now, but was a very valid concern at the time) and b) android eating them (there was a narrative they were about to be blackberried, or that android was doing what windows did to mac). There are good reasons why that didn't happen.

Not that small. High income and roughly the same population as California, which isn't too small for companies to bother selling into.

Ozempic did about US$2bn of revenue in 2024 in Canada.

Private companies do things to maximize profits. They might lose money on some stuff to make more on other things, and there might be some gunk in the system but they are almost all laser focused on making bigger profits.

Governments have lots of other incentives (like job creation, elections, income distribution)

Except it isn't at all. The properties to buy all have a fixed price, costs of houses/hotels are fixed, rents are fixed and can't be adjusted, and most importantly, a) you can only buy a property if you randomly happen to land on it and b) people have no choice of what property to stay at (again, chosen by random dice)

No, that is not the free market at work at all. I agree it happens however. We simply don't live in a 100% free market world.

I'm not here to debate whether free markets are good or bad, but governments have a privileged position versus private companies, and effectively operate above the law (again at least compared to private companies). Any government intervention takes us away from a free market, either a little bit or a lot, depending on the action. Apple is a private company. Anything it does is really part of the free market, at least in the original meaning of that as described by Adam Smith and co.

I'm not really disagreeing with you as it's not like there is a 100% true definition of a free market, different people can have different conceptions, but the original Adam Smith / classical view is that a free market should essentially be 100% driven by the private market on supply and demand - with as little government intervention as possible on either side of the ledger (subsidy or blocking)

Yep. But Apple are appealing that decision.

There is a limit to this sort of logic though. Don't get me wrong, I'm generally pro free markets. But: A) Apple's policies make some products completely unviable (anything with a gross margin less than 30%). Even for products at say 40% gross margin, Apple as a storefront is taking 75% of the gross margin pool (ie 30% to Apple, 10% to developer). This in my view is direct consumer harm. B) Apple acts egregiously and restricts what should be basic free speech. For instance, app developers not being able to even mention they have to pay Apple (let alone being able to direct customers to their own website etc). To me this is the biggest one - I could probably live with everything else more if developers at least could show customers where their fees were going etc. C) Apple has changed the rules over time, or at least how they enforce the rules (by trying to force more and more apps to pay the 30% - eg what they did to Patreon)

You are really trying to say that for a startup trying to build software, say a productivity app or whatever, they should consider launching their own hardware device? They are very different things and would basically make indie development impossible (or really any software company that can't raise hundreds of millions to billions)