magnax1
23d ago
Can you explain why other existing players, which are also multi-billion dollar corporations, haven't just gone ahead and copied Valve's model for the Steam store as closely as possible? Why is there no Pepsi to Valve's Coca-Cola in this situation?
I think they have and them some. Weren't some platforms literally giving away titles for free to pull away customers? I don't pay that close attention because I rarely play games (especially modern games) anymore.
There's a qualitative difference between "consumers pinch their nose and choose your product because the alternatives are worse" and "consumers happily fork over money and consider your product the standard to which all others should aspire."
I think your worldview is just plainly wrong. It reminds me of friends who complain about how modern clothes are shitty and don't last but don't buy solid durable clothing. I buy unbranded quality clothes or lightly used well established brands and my clothes last yeaes. They buy trash for the namebrand or because it's cheap and then get mad as if they didn't choose to make that trade off. With basically any product you have a million choices (exceptions were already stared, mainly in government backed monopolies or high barrier to entry markets). I can't really take the "Products are getting enshitified!" meme seriously when I can literally just go on google and find you an equivalent product for basically anything you ask for. Assuming you're in America, that is.
While I'm not quite saying "Steam is indifferent to competitive pressure due to their position," I am saying the Gabe can make decisions without worrying about the next quarter's earnings report. And he's consistently made decisions (including the decision to NOT change certain things) that make the users happier.
You really seem to buy into the "corporations only look at the next quarterly report" meme way too much. Amazon and google were not profitable for like a decade because they just kept reinventing their revenue. There are some cases where investors punish long term thinking (recently Intel) but I would say it's really not the norm, at least in growth industries.
magnax1
24d ago
Of course, my point that "public companies will happily capture consumer surplus to maximize profits" is fairly standard economic logic
Yes, but that these companies can just lower quality and raise prices without consequence is in fact not standard economic logic. "If it wasn't for Gabe they'd kill our firstborns etc. etc." does not follow logically from any of your points. If Steam makes a shitty product people will jump ship because there are tons of other options. That's the center of all of this that you don't seem to acknowledge. The companies you listed are popular because people like them. If Chik Fil-A sold a "consumer unfriendly chicken sandwich" (whatever the hell that might be) it probably wouldn't be a very popular store, would it?
There are differences in privately and publicly traded companies, yeah. However, it's just not this simple. Privately owned companies often times are maximally profit seeking and publicly traded companies often aren't.
magnax1
25d ago
Just take a quick assessment of ANY other comparable industry and see if there's any exceptions to the general rule that publicly-traded companies enshittify their product once they've achieved market dominance.
This seems like a pretty personal feeling that you have and I'm going to require significant evidence (not just feelings, actual economic data of some sort) to accept the claim.
Just a few points here--first of all, market dominance isn't very common. Second, it usually ceases to exist once a company starts making bad products. That's kind of how markets work after all. Exceptions are usually products which aren't very susceptible to market forces like cable/internet companies that own infrastructure with high barriers to entry or government regulation keeping out competitors, which indeed often suck. Valve's business model is basically the opposite of high barrier to entry. It costs almost nothing to run and you just need the money to spin up some servers. Market dominance is completely held together by keeping their customers happy.
Beyond that, the idea that Valve is just magically more kind because its leader is some nerd saint strikes me as unbelievable. Of course different leaders create different results, but guess what, Gabe wants money too.
magnax1
26d ago
Except there are like five other companies champing at the bit to run what is basically a free money printer that Gabe has set up. Valve basically does nothing as a company and gets paid for it because of steam. The only reason it has no real competition is because they know they have to keep their customers happy. This isn't something "Valve is a particularly moral upstanding company" thing, it's a plain market incentives thing. If anything, it might be better if they had some real competition.
magnax1
1mo ago
You're.misunderstanding how economies work. There isn't a set pool of "things that needs to be done" that labor pulls from and then gets a job according to that. People have endless desires, those desires are arbitrary, and there are limited resources. That means there's always more work to be done.
Nor does someone or something being better than you in every conceivable way does mean you cannot find a way to trade and profit within that system. Here's an explanation of that--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
If everyone is a therapist, how does that even work?
I don't know. That's kind of my point. How do therapists work now? I personally feel like 90% of their work is totally unproductive.People's desires are arbitrary though. You don't necessarily make more money by creating 5000 times more steel instead of paying some weirdo to listen to you blabber for an hour. That's one huge mistake the Soviets made.
magnax1
1mo ago
Where does the human go?
This is what people were saying during the industrial revolution. Don't forget that 90% of people in developed Europe were farmers 200 years ago. There will be winners and losers, but I don't see evidence that the 20th round of automation is different than the previous ones.
magnax1
1mo ago
This is a fair rebuttal. I don't think Americans workers will ever be willing to support 80% of the population with welfare, let alone the fiscal reality making it totally unfeasible.
tech layoffs continue
The tech sector right now has a lower unemployment than the general US economy
3.8% in the information sector vs 4.3%
I'm stating this first to sort of color the rest of my point in the context that a lot of what people say about what AI has already done is just bullshit. But furthermore, people fundamentally don't seem to understand how employment works. You can have mass layoffs and still have high employment. I'm not even sure tech layoffs are higher than other sectors, but I am sure thar every company that lays off tech workers gets front page news while if there's a cut in delivery drivers nobody notices.
The only smart prediction to make is that we don't really know. People here just don't realize how big and complex the economy is and the world at large is. Even if your job is gone, your skills are often still transferable. When horse carriage producers were put out of business they didn't all starve and never find jobs. They started working on building cars for the most part.
AI is just another step in a long line of automations. Is it an exceptional step? Probably. Will it ever replace all workers? No. By the nature of economics, that's basically impossible. People's desires are infinite and there arent infinite resources and labor, so there are always niches to fill. Might it make people poorer? Maybe. I kind of doubt it unless governments uses it as an oppressive system that cracks down on a lot of market activity.
My point here is really that making predictions is a fools errand. People have tried to do it, and at best a few get lucky and pretend they're geniuses and then return to the mean on the next prediction. There are obvious truths you can see, sure, like if the price of compute continues to decrease at an decelerating rate, it will significantly affect AI progress. I think that even as we see continued progress in AI, that will be the fundamental factor that's overlooked. Look at the flop count per dollar on a CPU from 2005 vs 2015 and then a GPU from 2015 vs 2025. Nvidia is squeezing some progress out in other ways, but at massive costs.
So my prediction is simple I guess. AI will be a big boon to the economy. It will take a few years for companies to learn how to cost effectively implement it.Some sectors will disproportionately reap the rewards. I suspect the gains will be in the.5-1% range of additional productivity growth a year, which is a lot. For context, the early industrial revolution was something like 2% growth year on year excluding population growth. With an extra 1% productivity growth the US would be higher than that right now I believe.
I also suspect there are factors that are huge burdens to society which AI can't overcome. Population decline. A war in Taiwan. Developed country and Chinese debt burdens. All of these things could affect AI. Which is ultimaty why all predictions beyond a year or two will be meaningfully wrong.
magnax1
1mo ago
Corporations or companies function is different across time and space. A company that exists in France must hold up to very different standards than America or China. This is one of the myriad reasons why when people criticize "capitalism" it's incoherent.
But in America, the purpose of a corporation is basically up to the owners. Usually that means maximize profit, but usually that's enforced by lawsuits from angry shareholders, not a strong explicit legal criterion. (although to some limited extent thar exists). However there are lots of exceptions. If you have a private corporation, then the goal of that corporation is whatever the owner(s) want. Anyone who has worked for a small or mid sized corporation with dictatorial owners probably knows well that sometimes profit isn't the singular motive.
We should rightly note that there are tons of "capitalist systems" (hereby defined as to some extent directed by a market) that don't seem to strive to full employment. Southern Europe has been at high unemployment for decades and chugs along without ever changing anything.
magnax1
1mo ago
I think the expectations of AI believers and the hype pushed out by the company is so absurd that it's quite easy to be considered an "AI skeptic" even if you're relatively bullish on AI. Like even if I were to believe an AI god were to come soon, we're just not getting 10% growth year on year. Not happening. Regulatory barriers alone make it impossible, and then there's diffusion problems, and then there's the fact that we just can't build up enough energy to scale growth that fast even if there were 0 regulatory barriers.
I do think the fact that the real world results never match the measured increases in AI capabilities is kind of indicative of the problem here. It's very easy to train AI in kind environments with clear feedback loops, but wicked environment outcomes are all over the place.
magnax1
1mo ago
So in the 1960 cohort, the smartest men and women would have 64 grandchildren by now, instead of their meager four. Imagine 16x the number of geniuses just from the 1960 cohort, and then 65x for the generation after ours. Imagine 65x the Terence Taos or John Carmacks. This is bad for the economy!
I don't know if this was facetious or serious, but that's obviously not how that works. IQ is inheritable, but it's not THAT inheritable (probably 30-50% IIRC) and there's also a regression to the mean every generation. So the smartest man's grandchildren will probably be pretty average assuming there isn't a cultural component being transmitted.
Good luck trying to measure any of this in studies
I mean, there are plenty of studies that measure stay at home vs working mom's children. The difference is there, but it's not huge. I think the premise that mom is better than a bureaucrat is wrong not because she isn't (obviously she is) but just that the bureaucrat doesn't have much influence on the child in the end while mom and dad always do.
magnax1
1mo ago
This seems really reductionist. The power of a nation is not so much in its population size now, so returning to a society where everyone has 5 kids has limited benefits (if any) and lots of negatives. What makes a nation powerful now is its economic engine, and that includes having women work. Obviously the current system is a failure as well, but when you say feminism is a failure, you need to remember its been a gradual change since the 1800s. Maybe the current additions are failures (I would argue so) but women joining the workforce and participating in society in at least some different ways is hard to make a rational case again.
magnax1
1mo ago
People aren't interested in AI media just like people aren't interested in watching chess bots over Magnus Carlson. The reasoning is post hoc and doesn't really matter. AI "art" (I use quotes because that term is used too loosely, not because it's AI) will only really be popular when people use AI to build their own ideas.
magnax1
1mo ago
Bluntly: the schools you attend before college did not really matter
The Indian system is more legible and crueler about it; the American system is less legible and crueler about hiding it.
I don't think you've made a good case that what college you go to really matters, at least in th US. The US isn't hiding the correlation between what school you go to and your success....it just isn't a very strong correlation. I can't speak for other countries, but look at congress and you'll see state schools galore. There's a correlation, but non-Americans don't seem to realize that in America the schools aren't the selection process in America. Koreans spend a gajillion hours and bajillion dollars on studying because if you don't pass the test to get into a chaebol you're shit out of luck. But if you pass you can get a job and not produce anything as long as you work 60 hours a week and look like you work. Try that in America and see how it goes. Part of this is culture--confucian culture has instilled that testing is the best way to determine ability for more than a millennium--but part of it is labor law. If it's hard to fire someone it's almost impossible to make a meritocratic labor market. Instead you try really hard to weed out anyone who isn't willing to waste years of their lives studying for something very arbitrary. Does it work? No. Do you have another choice? Also no.
Honestly, I would guess that what grade school you go to does a much better job building up your intuition for class markers and job opportunities than university. Yeah, the diversity hire at Harvard is getting a good chance, but they'll have a lot harder time fitting in at Anthropic or a fintech firm than the guy who was raised in that culture. Harvard is a better selection marker, but that's not the same as doing a better job at forming someone into the type of person who is successful. Instead, it's weeding out the people who can't succeed.
magnax1
3mo ago
Iran is an oil state that completely ruined itself through religious revolution and now regularly mass murders its population whenever they vet the balls to protest every couple years and exports terrorism throughout the region. Are the gulf states retarded? I guess so. Would any sane person prefer to live in Iran over them? No.
magnax1
5mo ago
This is just geopolitically and historically ignorant. No, the US did not bomb or invade these countries at the behest of Israel. It was because of America's geopolitical objectives, which were to implement democracy and stabilize the region so that oil flow would not be impeded. The reason why Israel is an American ally is because they're the only meaningful democracy in the region and have most of the same objectives..
o act like Iran, an Islamic theocracy which hates America on a very fundamental ideological basis, only points its ire towards America because it invaded Iraq (which tried to invade Iran by the way, among other neighbors) and bombed ISIS and Libya is just factually incorrect. Iran's regime has been fanatically anti-America long before any of this went on and would still be even if its objectives of destroying Israel succeeded.
Israel has been hostile and aggressive against all of its regional neighbors and used the US for its dirty work, and it's a shock that makes an enemy of Iran? It's one of the steep costs of this pseudo-alliance with Israel, which is not an alliance at all. It's subversive and always has been.
Do you know the history of Israel and what it's neighbors goals explicitly state they wanted and still want to do to it?
The notion that Turkey has 10 times more domination of those neighbors than Israel, who is actively bombing them and taking credit for overthrowing Assad and on the verge of overthrowing Iran, is of course totally delusional.
That Turkey is not at war with its neighbors is not evidence that it's much more powerful than Israel. It has more than 9 times the population, a much larger militaryt and it's also not totally ineffectually commanded like most Arabs in the region.
magnax1
5mo ago
You're going to need a lot of evidence for that claim when the simple explanation that the American government wants a government with nuclear ICBM aspiration that holds regular "death to America" chants changed is much more fitting. It certainly seems more in the interests of America than Israel, which will have to deal with the fallout of a neighbor's regime collapse.
Also, Israel will still be almost an order of magnitude less dominant in the region than Turkey, and much less than the Saudis as well. It's not even close to being a regionally dominant power.
magnax1
5mo ago
Not sure I agree. He has been absolutely destroying Chinese growth and future prospects. The problem is systems are smarter than people and both are rampaging against what were effectively built systems to greater or lesser degrees.
magnax1
5mo ago
This is tangential, but this is why when people say things like "China is smart, they won't just start a war over Taiwan." I laugh. Systems with high power individuals at the top run at the behest of that individual, and this is much more true or China than America. If Russia was smart they would've waited out Ukraine to hollow out demographically and become complacent, but Russia isn't in charge, Putin is and Putin wants to be remembered as the guy who reunited greater Russia. Likewise for Xi, maybe
magnax1
6mo ago
I'm an economist. I know what I'm talking about lol. Many national saving rates include both private and public investment. Maybe I should've clarified, but what I said is a pretty basic irrefutable fact.
magnax1
6mo ago
Look up the savings rate for China vs the US to see where wage suppression comes into play. The government forces large amounts of money into capital investments instead of wages which shows up in the data as a high savings rate.
magnax1
6mo ago
Isn't this pretty much an obvious conspiracy theory? They simply don't have enough high-paying white collar jobs for an enormous surge in overqualified university graduates. Why the hell wouldn't wages be stagnant if supply outstrips demand.
No, it's just a simple economic policy to increase export driven growth at the expense of people's quality of life.
https://www.paftad.org/files/34/01_YANG%20YAO_Growth.pdf
To be fair, China didn't invent this. Japan and Korea used similar policies to drive export led growth, but China's internal passport system is kind of unique (I think the soviets had a similar system, but the effects are quite different in an export led economy), and one of the largest barriers to wage growth.
This doesn't also cover the huge subsidies for industries that act as an indirect tax on local consumers.
magnax1
6mo ago
Why are we seriously entertaining this superficial think tanker nonsense? There was no separation of powers, there was a detente between oligarchic groups, Shanghai clique and Communist Youth League. China had never developed instintutionalized separation of powers, it was a system of informal customs of succession and balanced Politburo composition. The primary result of this was the viability of endless corruption under the veneer of "growth" from inflating the property bubble.
Separation of powers is essentially a stalemate of different groups, whether formalized or otherwise.
But that's my entire point.
Using cars as an example of decline in quality is quite insane. Do you know what sort of advancements in technology cars have made and how little it would cost to make a car from 1990 with modern techniques? I mean, you can kind of seeing it in Russia or China where they sell cars that aren't fit for foreign markets for 10k or so (albeit their production techniques aren't modern, so it's not quite equivalent) but...jeeze...this is a really bad example. I'm really not going to go into detail on all the automotive progress made in just the past 15 years, but it's been massive. You can argue that cars are too expensive because of regulation and have a very good point, but that's not the same thing at all.
You're making cost savings sound like some nefarious act. Companies want to lower costs to compete in markets. This is not nefarious.
You're changing your argument. Before you said privately owned corporations have an advantage in that they don't have to be profit maximizing (to which I noted, neither do publicly traded corporations) and now you're saying because Bezos owned a large portion (not sure if he was the majority owner or not, but I actually don't think he was) it doesn't count.
Again, if it's shit you can just go to another platform, like you apparently did. I frankly haven't noticed any drop off. In fact, their Amazon knockoff brand is a huge upgrade over a lot of the stuff they sold 15+ years ago when I started using the site.
But again, what's your point? If a corporation does a bad job there are literally a million other options. You're acting like people are getting screwed when they willingly go to Amazon and buy things over their competitors (because Amazon has a massively better product tbh) and furthermore your google point just seems like bullshit to me. Have you tried to use a non-google search Engine? Duckduckgo is absolute trash. So is Bing. Google is the best without question excluding maybe using a good AI to aggregate information for you.
I can't say there are many companies that return from being driven into the ground at all tbh. Most companies do one thing well, reap the reward, can't change when that thing is no longer as profitable as it once was, and then die. That's kind of how the system is supposed to work. I'm really not sure how that's relevant to the idea that companies are just manipulating people into buying shitty products.
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