Sure because you had to distribute sales and place product. You shifted marketing off to the retail location and distributor and you still controlled the price / mark up.
Pizza is already sold, the last mile delivery should have zero impact on its retail. Right now the last mile delivery has a near monopoly on retail of a restaurant. Pretending that toast/grubhub/seamless somehow benefit the customer is pure rubbish.
The average person in America is living paycheck to paycheck and has negative equity.
20 years ago you couldn’t see in Shanghai. Trump pulled back the clean air act, it’s not hard to see a trend. It’s also not hard to buy a ticket and see it yourself.
Great point, I almost wrote that they’ve cleaned up pollution (of all types) by a lot and also are accomplish some impressive feats by regreening and pushing back desertification. Amazing things can happen when you get your peoples basic needs met (ie, they can focus on higher level stuff).
60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. It depends on which Americans you are looking at if you want to understand who capitalist ownership is benefiting.
There is a ton of money being siphoned off with zero place to put it. When sv collapsed why does Roku park half a billion dollars in a bank account. Roku has 8th of Mazda’s net worth parked in a bank account… there is unchecked capitalization for the sake of the share price, this money is doing nothing except buying up competition.
The Roku example perfectly illustrates the deeper issue here - we're seeing a systemic breakdown in capital allocation that goes beyond the passive/active debate.
The real problem is a feedback loop: large companies get cheaper capital → they can afford to hoard cash and make defensive acquisitions → this reduces competition and innovation → which paradoxically makes them even "safer" investments → reinforcing their cost-of-capital advantage.
Meanwhile, the "missing middle" gets squeezed from both ends. Small companies can access some capital through VC/growth equity, but medium enterprises ($10M-$1B revenue) face a brutal gap. They're too big for most VCs, too small for institutional debt markets, and banks are increasingly consolidated and risk-averse.
(I am so personally familiar with the missing middle in my day job)
This isn't just about market efficiency - it's about market structure. When a streaming company parks $500M in bank accounts instead of investing in content or technology, that's not rational capital allocation. It's defensive positioning enabled by cheap capital and regulatory capture. There are many many lazy companies sitting on a cash machine structure with no decent ideas on how to grow.
Some potential fixes:
- Tax policy that penalizes excessive cash hoarding; eliminating the tax deduction on interest would encourage companies to hold less cash by making cash more expansive
- Regulatory limits on horizontal acquisitions above certain market share thresholds
- Public development banks focused on the missing middle (like Germany's KfW)
- Capital gains tax advantages for investments held in companies under certain size thresholds
The irony is that this concentration might ultimately hurt passive investors too - less competition means less innovation and slower long-term growth across the entire economy.
Nearly every startup I've talked to recently (last year or so) has been cash flow positive after just series A (or sometimes after just a seed round!)
Companies are pursuing smart business strategies and prioritizing healthy rates of growth over "hire everyone we can and figure out how to make a profit later". I'm seeing a lot of very focused businesses that are meeting customers demand right away and solving real problems. They aren't billion dollar problems, but they are profitable problems to solve. I wonder how the startup ecosystem will change if VCs start seeing 60% of companies making a healthy profit after a couple years, vs the historical trend of waiting a decade and hoping 1 company strikes it big. 60% of companies growing 10-20x ROI seems ... Not bad?
One problem of large mega corps is they don't even bother to go after new ideas that aren't multi-billion dollars markets. It used to be Microsoft would make a bunch of senior engineers filthy rich, they'd go boot strap a new company, and if the idea took off, Microsoft would aquire them again. Some people in the 90s/early 2000s pulled that off multiple times!
If some business is defensively buying off all the competition, that’s an easy ATM for a serial entrepreneur, especially if the large business is price gouging: found a competitor, grow it e.g. with some like-minded funding, sell it at a premium. Wait for the clauses of the contract to run out, and rinse and repeat.
The defensive acquisitions can work on domains with gravity effects to a degree, but those are domains are far from being the total market.
> found a competitor, grow it e.g. with some like-minded funding, sell it at a premium. Wait for the clauses of the contract to run out, and rinse and repeat.
Unrealistic, that strategy has no history of success. MariaDB tried... still wimpy.
> The defensive acquisitions can work on domains with gravity effects to a degree, but those are domains are far from being the total market.
Not so. Market size and inertia, connections, red tape and political weight are always present, fundamental forces of "gravity". They are the total market, at least the part of it that matters.
More importantly, even if your strategy of "feeding the machine for personal gain" did work, it amounts only to feeding the machine without changing its nature or direction. That strategy can benefit few individuals but it can't fix any of the issues discussed here.
I think only time will tell? Let me flip this on it's head.
LLMs allow me to tackle stuff I have no business tackling because the support from the LLM for the task far exceeds google / stack overflow / [insert data source for industry or task].
Does the concept sink in? Yes and no, I am moving too fast most of the time to retain the solution.
When the task is complex enough and LLM gets it wrong, oh boy is it educational, not only do I have to figure out why the LLM is wrong, I have to now correct my understanding and learn to reason against it.
I was a very bad student, most of the classes didn't make sense to me, bored me out of my mind, I failed a lot. Do I ever feel that way when talking to Chatgpt about a task I have no idea how to solve? No, and guess what we figure it out together.
Another data point, my english writing has improved by using chatgpt to refactor / reformat, more examples, mostly correct english structure. Over time stuff sinks in even if you are not writing it, you are still reading it, and editing.
Lets take code for a minute, is it easier to edit someone else's code or your own? So everyone that has to dive deep into troubleshooting chatgpt's code is somehow dumb/lazy? I don't think so, they are at least as smart as the code.
What would happen if we made a curriculum around using chatgpt, how far would I get in chem 1 if I spent 90 minutes with chatgpt prompts prepared by a professor and a machine that never gets tired of explaining / rephrasing until I get it?
I get your point and I agree with it, I don't think this flips anything. What you are describing is an engaged, motivated student who is using the tools for learning when the traditional system did not suit them. I am actually the same, had shit grades, and found traditional lectures pointless.
What I am describing in what I and many colleagues have run into are students who are not engaged or motivated with their work because there is a path of much less resistance, and are using the LLMs to pass learning moments with minimal effort.
When you choose to edit the code of the LLM instead of feeding it all back to it with the added prompt "it does not work, fix it", you have already made a choice in learning.
edit; I do agree on the curriculum change, however, there is a time-window now before there has been a consensus on the new ways of learning and political action from the universities where the learning is to a much higher degree in the hands of students than the universities. And this power can lead both ways to a higher extent than before when the university was in control of this.
Because Wi-Fi going down for a minute or two doesn’t matter in most deployments. And when it does… you submit a change ticket and not just Yoo-hoo a change in production.
Reading this thread I’ve been using unifi equipment for over a decade why are people tinkering with their networks on a daily basis?
I have more issues with enterprise equipment than with unifi equipment because it just works, and it’s 1/5th of the price, and I can buy a replacement the same day. My spf modules on junipers cost more than most of the products in the entire unifi catalog and can’t support being downlinked to 1GB on one port without the whole module being set 1gb and the entire core rebooted.
The amount of hate is simply unwarranted, people are afraid to patch enterprise switches because historically that meant driving out and a call with TAC, when did we start pretending that enterprise network equipment works flawlessly?
Because if it worked better then we’d be doing it already. But no amount of cryptobro podcasts are going to fix the shortcomings of digital currencies. And everyone knows this.
My dollar will be worth a dollar tomorrow and will sit in my wallet. My crypto currency is worthless on most of the planet. Do you take payments in LoL skins or vbucks?
Many places? Lets see, chase bank has 5k locations in the US. I have 3 locations near me, and if I wanted to use something like on online bank like Betterment, I can go 30-40 locations immediately near me and they will cover the transaction fees...
The closest bitcoin ATM is 20 miles away from me in another town at a sketchy gas station. Let me just hop over and grab 3k out of it and get robbed.
> I cannot reproduce this in any version of copilot?
Because LLM-based service outputs are fundamentally not-reproduceable. We have no insight into any of the model settings, the context, what model is being run, etc.
The pipeline Microsoft is using for Copilot products hides actually what models they are using, and you have no influence over it. Sometimes they use smaller models, but I have no clear source from Microsoft saying this ...
You order on Uber Eats, Toast, Seamless, and they set the prices pushing them up.
It’s a completely parasitic market and if a restaurant does not participate it’s squeezed out due to not being able to compete with online ordering.
You notice how you can’t just order from xyzpizza.com and choose 1-7 vendors to deliver the pizza? They should class actioned into the depth of hell.
Imagine going to Nike.com, but Nike has to sell on the usp website at the ups price because they deliver the last mile package…
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