They are not entitled to a moat, and their customers do not owe them one. Several companies have narrow or no moats. Dell and HP are two examples when it comes to their PC business.
This idea that companies should be allowed to lock down their products just so they can have moats, is how we ended up with printer ink being more expensive than crude oil or champagne.
Companies are absolutely allowed to lock down their own products. Netflix is a great example, you don't bring your own client for Netflix.
The whining/entitlement in this thread is ridiculous. The API is always there for you to use as you desire.
If you want to use the loss leader on the other hand, you agree to abide by certain terms. But if you don't want to do that, just use the API. It's not that hard.
Yes, because if that was their sales pitch, they would need to pay Kim more, and they would have to account for the fact that she's already allocated elsewhere. It's better to pretend all those CCAs are interchangeable.
Adding new features doesn't necessarily grow the market. Your bread with nuts and berries competes with the regular bread for the customer's money. Other things also compete for the same money, such as medical, daycare, schooling etc. So increasing features won't necessarily grow the market because the market. Even in an optimistic scenario, those features only have a probability of increasing revenue, it's not certain.
OTOH, if you fire those workers, it is a certainty that your bakery gets more cash. You can then use that cash to reward your shareholders (a category that conveniently includes you) via buybacks or dividends.
> in order to extract resources from the local government in Iraq and Lebanon.
How evil of them to do that. They should have known only the United States of America has the divine right to invade countries and extract their resources. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4grxzxjjd8o
> That's called Imperialism and was common among european powers in the 19th century
> How evil of them to do that. They should have known only the United States of America has the divine right to invade countries and extract their resources
Yes, OP was already saying Iran is free to act because the US is an imperial power. I was merely stating that he is conveniently ignoring Iran's imperialist behavior
Equating Iran's struggle against a genocide in Palestine with Imperialism is misinformed at best, criminal at worst. Either way, only a zionist could say that, which makes this conversation completely useless.
And while we're speaking of people that hold guns to everyone's heads, there is one country that is waging war all over the world. It's govt also executed people in broad daylight for the crimes of taking their kid to school and helping a person beaten up by the administration's goons. Would you entertain the idea of similar airstrikes against the head of that country?
> Iran is supporting massive conflicts in Yemen, and is building non-defensive weapons capabilities.
>And while we're speaking of people that hold guns to everyone's heads, there is one country that is waging war all over the world. It's govt also executed people in broad daylight
Isn't that Iran? Remember the mass killings of the protestors? 36000 intentional deaths (Iran) vs 50 possibly accidental deaths (USA) [0]. Even if the deaths in the US were mediated by a burning hatred with the fire of a thousand suns that could still only amount to a few thousand death equivalents in a country where more than three hundred million people live (USA) vs 93 million in Iran.
We see ICE being evil in front of us, we don't see the actions of the Iranian regime, our 'daily ire' is reserved for the Orange Menace, so it badly distorts our rhetoric.
I don't think anyone should care about the Iranian regime - other than it might get worse, or unstable, or create a regional conflict that will just create more problems for everyone.
None of THIS rhetoric even responded to the quotes you highlighted.
You'll have to do better than calling people racist for no apparent reason.
If there is one tiny, little barely a sliver of a silver-lining out of all of this Trump insanity, is that we don't hear a lot of people getting called racist for being disagreeable anymore, there are real issues to deal with.
Human beings are able to work out the ambiguity because a lot of meaning is carried in shared context, which in turn arises out of cultural grounding. That achieves disambiguation, but only in a limited sense. If humans could perfectly disambiguate, you wouldn't have people having disputes among otherwise loving spouses and friends, arising out of merely misunderstanding what the other person said.
Programming languages are written to eliminate that ambiguity because you don't want your bank server to make a payment because it misinterpreted ambiguous language in the same way that you might misinterpret your spouse's remarks.
Can that ambiguity be resolved with more English words? Maybe. But that would require humans to be perfect communicators, which is not that easy because again, if it were possible, humans would have learnt to first communicate perfectly with the people closest to them.
To reinforce that point: we've got the world's most prominent AI promoting company (MSFT), that has finally realized that Windows Explorer is too slow to start.
And this company, with all the formidable powers of AI behind them, can find no way to optimize that other than pre loading the app in memory. And that's for a app that's basically a GUI for `ls`
> The jobs could themselves become more desirable with machines automating the boring and dangerous parts
Or, as Cory Doctorow argues, the machines could become tools to extract "efficiency" by helping the employer make their workers lives miserable. An example of this is Amazon and the way it treats its drivers and warehouse workers.
That depends on the social contract we collectively decide (in a democracy at least). Many possibilities will emerge and people need to be aware and adapt much faster than most times in history.
In the case of horses and cars, you need the same number of people to drive both (exactly one per vehicle). In the case of AI and automation, the entire economic bet is that agents will be able to replace X humans with Y humans. Ideally for employers Y=0, but they'll settle for Y<<X.
People seem to think this discussion is a binary where either agents replace everybody or they don't. It's not that simple. In aggregate, what's more likely to happen (if the promises of AI companies hold good) is large scale job losses and the remaining employees becoming the accountability sinks to bear the blame when the agent makes a mistake. AI doesn't have to replace everybody to cause widespread misery.
Yes, I understand that it's about saving on labor costs. Depending on how successful this is, it could lead to major changes in the labor market in economies where skilled workers have been doing quite well up to now.
This idea that companies should be allowed to lock down their products just so they can have moats, is how we ended up with printer ink being more expensive than crude oil or champagne.
reply