It's still pretty confusing: Uunchecking the box doesn't seem to do much (is it actually unchecked when you click it? There's still a checkmark); you still have to click Accept to see the text; what are you accepting?
In any case, pre-checked boxes are not valid consent under GDPR (“Planet49”).
I find it hilarious when companies are following their stated goal of making profits, while everybody else is rushing to explaining rising prices by factoring in everything but profits.
Well, you have to come up with a reason for why now -- the profit motive has been there forever.
There's also a question of why high margins don't induce new entrants to these markets, or why consumers responding too cleanly to higher prices by buying less. There's been a variety of factors at play and I think if you want to pin it on profits you gotta put in the legwork to rule out or at least quantify the dozens of other factors.
And like, if Nintendo wants to charge an extra ten dollars for Zelda[1], I don't think thats any kind of call for EU/UK regulators to step in.
> I suspect what happened was rising prices because of the pandemic and the war showed companies they can increase prices without also suffering a significant decrease in sales. After all, when virtually all prices are going up, where are consumers going to go?
I'm not disputing that's what is happening, but I do find it interesting _why_ its happening. Consider a scenario where consumer demand for your product jumps rapidly. The two normal profit maximizing responses are to raise prices and increase output. Ideally do both.
On the Odd Lots podcast, it's been discussed in various markets that companies that survived 2008 learned to avoid large capital investments when their competitors all went out of business chasing market share. And if market incumbents are all too afraid of making large, long term investments right now, output can only go up after new entrants to the market appear.
The online discourse seems to favor cigars and shady board rooms, but it seems just as likely to be risk aversion.
Its hard to enter a market as a truly novel competitor. Chances are on your way up you run into some essential sources that are controlled by a competitor. Imagine starting a Peach computer company in your garage today. You think Broadcom will want to potentially sour their relationship with Apple by offering you good terms? There's a reason why a lot of these "pulled myself up by the bootstraps" stories happened in eras where you could comfortably rent a workshop with little means and do things like solder your circuitry for a desktop computer by hand and ship it to clients yourself. A lot of such windows of opportunity were open for a few short years or even decades but have long since been shut and bricked over.
> There's a reason why a lot of these "pulled myself up by the bootstraps" stories happened in eras where you could comfortably rent a workshop with little means and do things like solder your circuitry for a desktop computer by hand and ship it to clients yourself.
If only there was a discussion forum that could match up founders with venture capitalists ready to take on big challenges!
You have picked perhaps the worst example industry, on perhaps the worst venue to write it.
I think the pandemic has played an extremely important role in the public's perception of inflation.
During the start of the pandemic, there were legitimate supply chain shortages that resulted that resulted in increased prices without increased profits.
Supply chain issues are mostly fixed, but companies road that public perception for a long time to justify price increases.
How could desire for profits possibly be an explanation for _rising prices_? Were companies not seeking profits in the 2010s? Did they only become greedy in recent years?
It seems obvious to me that if companies could have raised prices more previously they would have. Therefore companies pushing price is just a proximate cause of inflation, not a root cause.
I still don't find the argument persuasive. Companies have always tried to maximize profits, as you said.
To me this highlights more companies realizing they have pricing power similar to monopoly power or cartel power. A company that has lots of competition can't raise its profit margins. But a company with a moat, where no competitors are able to fund the capital needed to compete, can raise profits.
They always want to maximize profits, but they don't have this opportunity every day. They will increase their profits if there is a convenient reason like "inflation".
I guess I'm still not convinced the "reasoning" has anything to do with it.
If a company says the reason is inflation they can only maintain that pricing power if every other firm does the same thing. If no firm decides to keep prices the same, to steal more of the market, that suggests to me that either inflation is real (perhaps in a harder to quantify way than just supplies) or companies have much more consolidated competitors than they used to (perhaps start up costs are now high so new entrants become impossible).
> If a company says the reason is inflation they can only maintain that pricing power if every other firm does the same thing
empirically, this is what's effectively happening in multiple instances
given the content of the article of this post, I'm not convinced anyone can reasonably conclude that profit increases aren't accounting for a large portion of inflation: such a conclusion is unpersuasive given said content
the questions of "why now" etc. are interesting, and I encourage you to seek answers on them, but answers to them aren't necessary to observe reality, a reality the article helpfully illustrates
why did I decide on coffee this morning instead of tea? another similarly interesting question, but the answer, or lack thereof, similarly doesn't change the fact that that's what happened.
That really isn't how it works. Most real-world competition by far happens in a context of product differentiation where suppliers are only imperfect substitutes for each other's products. So you can raise prices and not be "outbid" in such a way anytime soon. Your market share would only suffer gradually over time if you kept your prices higher than the market.
It's tragedy of the commons. A series of events that have happened which has misaligned the market into an unspoken cartel. An opportunity (or temporary need) arose to raise prices and now they don't want to lower them. They are looking over their shoulder and their friendly rivals aren't doing so either.
I suspect what happened was rising prices because of the pandemic and the war showed companies they can increase prices without also suffering a significant decrease in sales. After all, when virtually all prices are going up, where are consumers going to go?
Because the basic economic argument against this theory is pretty sound. Companies can't arbitrarily raise prices because market competition drives profits down. It's why highly competitive industries like the restaurant sector aren't profitable, everyone competes for the same consumers, and the lowest cost provider will win.
Inflation doesn't actually change anything about this so if companies can just collude and make up prices the question is why did they only start doing it three years ago
You know how you think the world should work and you reject evidence in front of you. You do not liok for counter-evidence, or find faults in the evidence presented - you just reject it outright, like how flat earther rejects physics
But could they? For example, in a normal economy if you increase prices people will spot the trick very easily. Not when everyone is concerned about "inflation".
Of course inflation is "just" businesses increasing their prices, how else would prices increase - they are decided by humans after all. It's STILL the fault of loose monetary policy. Do you understand that?
Many people mention corporate profits drive inflation like that's the end of the conversation. It's the equivalent of saying your house got flooded because the door broke open (allowing the raging hurricane outside to get in). It's pointing at a barely relevant proximal cause to ignore the real issue (the raging hurricane).
The economy is a system of individual actors. Everyone is constantly trying to raise their price (employees and employers included). When you do the equivalent of doubling the money supply in under a year, combined with covid supply chain issues, you create an environment where actors in the economy are able to dramatically increase their prices - often out of necessity because their competitors and suppliers are doing the same. The consequence is inflation. This happens if and only if you dump massive amounts of money into the economy above and beyond what can be absorbed by the rate of production.
In a sense, both are technically true: inflation is because Biden among other world leaders flooded the economy with money, and the economy aka the system of individual actors reacted to this and found they were able to raise prices because the economy could sustain that. The difference is that one of these is a massive unforced error with easily foreseen consequences that caused significant suffering, and the other is human nature (wrapped up in a prisoner's dilemma).
The blame is still rightfully entirely on people like Biden who greenlit this objectively terrible policy.
I think tipping incentivises managers to lowball workers. I'm not buying into that "service not included" bullshit. How about you just... include it, and start paying at least the minimum wage if not more? I get tipping when someone goes out of their way or whatever but, frankly, pushing cups and plates around rarely sparks a conversation. And oftentimes it's just that. I'm from an European country where tipping is expected to the point where they give you a surprised stare and they might mutter something. About a year ago I stopped tipping and stopped caring about such expectations. It's none of my business.
If you want premium support then yes you should be for example: one of my clients spent several hundred thousand a year and has a massive part of their operation dependent on AWS, so they also paid for premium support.
If a business is wholly dependent on a particular vendor and that vendor offers additional support, it seems to behoove the business to pay for the additional vendor support.
It's similar to people who complain that they are losing millions of dollars because they can't get Azure support to work with them, but then when asked if they have contacted their account rep confess they don't have an account manager to help them.
Basically paying for additional support is like insurance, you probably won't need it, but if you do you'll be glad you have it.
Doesn’t make sense. What’s wrong with <br />? It’s a hell of a lot easier to parse than having an exception for <br> which is then transformed in <br></br>.
Facebook maintains a list of topics it thinks you are interested in and shows you ads based on that. You can see and manage it in the Ad Preferences section. See https://m.facebook.com/help/247395082112892
Google too has My Activity https://myactivity.google.com/ where you can manage your… activity on Google properties e.g. you can disable search history.
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FWIW I have Google history turned off, though I use DuckDuckGo 99% of the time.
Also I’ve reset my Facebook preferences once a couple of years ago. It was a very long process as there was no one button to clear them all… Anyway, I was hoping it would reset my Facebook experience entirely, but I wouldn’t say it did. I revisited the section some time later and found Facebook had built another list. A lot of seemingly random topics, but I suspect they’re weighted. I’m no longer logged in in any of my browsers, only the Facebook mobile app. Also I occasionally report ads for random reasons.
