It's due to the decline of in-person socializing by young people.
Young people don't get introduced to it as much. Less in-person peer pressure. Fewer parties. Young people do things in groups that they won't bother doing alone because it's not as fun.
The EU loves to ransom US tech companies for budget money. It's very clear that this is an opportunity for the US to similarly damage a big EU company by threatening its patents in the US, or otherwise hitting Novo for tens of billions of dollars in ransom money. The US market is by a huge margin the most important drug market in the world, and especially for Novo.
Find an abusive excuse to invalidate their patents if all else fails. Let Europe learn a valuable lesson in trade wars.
At this point in time, you are in no position to be teaching any lessons to the rest of the world, other than cautionary tales of wasted potential and the self-inflicted wounds of a belligerent populace.
Fundamentally XL for them extends their ability to continue to rip people off on what they charge for storage, a very lucrative business for Apple. Helps that little 128gb go a bit further.
But most of us work around this with a $2.99/mth iCloud+ subscription which gets us 200GB storage on the cloud. Not a deal but a trivial enough cost to not worry about running out of storage.
As a non pro user, this is perfectly ok for storing all of my 33k photos since 2007.
Then why is there such a gigantic welfare state for the poor in the US?
Why do the top 50% fund nearly all of the government (97% of all taxes)? The top 25% pay around 90% of all income taxes. Why does the US have an aggressively progressive taxation system if it's so utopian for the rich? That's quite obviously not how the rich would choose to arrange things at all. The top 1% take in 26% of income and pay 44% of all income taxes. The top 1% pay the highest average tax rate of any group (26%), over double the median figure.
Medicaid + SS disability + all state and local healthcare programs cost over a trillion dollars per year and are free for the poorest 1/4.
The US Govt alone (not including local or state) spent $200 billion on all of its food assistance programs in 2022.
These programs go toward people who contribute almost nothing in taxes.
> Why do the top 50% fund nearly all of the government (97% of all taxes)?
That's a flat out lie - that's not "all taxes", that's only one tax - Federal income. That's only about half what the IRS takes in (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/18/who-pays-...), and then there's stuff like state, local, and non-IRS taxes like gasoline.
> The top 25% pay around 90% of all income taxes.
Guess what percentage of the wealth they hoover up.
A solid indication the level of taxation for that bracket is too low. Maybe it needs to add brackets up to the trillions, because there is a world of difference between 1M, 100M, 1B and, soon, 1T of net worth.
Remember - if you can't control money's political power, you need to control money itself, or the wealthy will have political power without the backing of votes.
You're looking at income quantiles, not wealth quantiles. It's misleading. Rich people don't earn salary.
A startup CEO probably gets a salary of like $250k, not much different from a senior SWE. However, the CEO has stock options worth hundreds of millions.
And those are ISOs, which are subject to favorable tax treatment...
...if you could exercise them for pennies, which is exactly what the CEO gets to do, because he gets the options before they ramp the valuation.
Rich people do not make high incomes. Incomes are taxed. Rich people keep their money.
> That is debatable. What was the last war it won?
Iraq in 2003. Trivially stomped what was left of the Iraqi military and Saddam's entire government. There's a difference between a war and attempted nation building. And worth noting that nation building Iraq has not failed as of yet 20 years later. Iraq's GDP per capita is higher than Vietnam, Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt, Philippines, India, etc - which isn't horrible given what they have been through.
What was the last war it lost? It didn't lose in Vietnam; it won every major engagement and along with South Vietnam held ~85% of territory when the US and South + North Vietnam signed a peace treaty and the US left. North Vietnam promptly ignored the treaty and resumed its conquest. Funny to pretend the US lost a war years after it left. It didn't lose in Afghanistan, the primary mission was to destroy bin Laden's Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (which was fully accomplished and bin Laden was killed). Nation building failed in Afghanistan, although the US was able to easily hold the core of the country with sub 30,000 soldiers and could have technically stayed forever (but it was pointless).
Endlessly debatable what counts as a win, and over what timeframe.
Did the North win the Civil War? In 1865, that answer was fairly clear. In 2024, perhaps less so. I suspect 1870s Americans would be a little surprised that Confederate flags and monuments pop up all over in the 20th and 21st centuries.
May I remind you that an entire US Navy Carrier Strike Group can't handle[1][2][3][4] a bunch of deranged desert goat herders lobbing explosive tin cans at them and the shipping lane they're supposed to protect?
The US hasn't won a war ever since WW2, and our top-of-the-world military has always lost to guerillas armed with nothing more complicated than an AK-47 and a Toyota pickup. Our best jet fighter's sole kill is a fucking balloon.
No, the US's track record is French levels of trash and I fear more for ourselves than the enemy in an actual peer war where they will be armed with something better than AK-47s and balloons.
[2]: >“This is the most sustained combat that the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II — easily, no question,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage.
[4]: >There isn’t a Prosperity Guardian ship within 500 miles. Back in May when the carrier USS Dwight D Eisenhower was present, the US had 12 warships on station providing a mix of missile picket and escorting duties. Now they have zero. ... There can only be one conclusion: that the US has given up on Operation Prosperity Guardian. It wasn’t deterring the Houthis and it wasn’t reassuring shipping so they might as well go and do something else.
The 1990-1991 Gulf War, and the US-backed campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan were major armed conflicts that the US unequivocally won.
The conflict against ISIL ("AK-47s and Toyota pickups") was essentially won (the Daesh still exist, but the ISIL no longer exists as a territorial state). There've been several smaller lesser-known conflicts post-WW2 that Wikipedia considers to be US victories ("operational successes"), as well.
> our top-of-the-world military has always lost to guerillas
Maybe that's a good thing. Can you name any military that won a guerrilla war without resorting to concentration camps and total war against the entire populace?
I guess the point is to prevent a guerrilla war from starting without committing crimes against humanity. This implies other action complementing brute-force military incursions has been taken and that the people don't see you as an enemy.
Currently, the "we'll liberate you, you're welcome" approach is not working.
What good is a top-world military if we can't win wars without resorting to ancient barbarism?
I'm serious, our absolute best loses to some AK-47 manufactured over half a century ago that's seen shit and a beater Toyota pickup that's seen more sand than sense, operated by someone shouting something about chocolate bars. We have 11 nuclear aircraft carriers and we can't protect a single shipping lane.
>Maybe that's a good thing.
Be very careful what you wish for. When Pax Americana ends, whatever succeeds it won't be kind to us.
I meant that every military that has successfully defeated a guerrilla resistance has done so by resorting to cruelty and mass human rights violations. The US military's relative lack of success in these conflicts could mean they haven't done that. Pax Americana is great but so is good conduct in war.
Apple isn't left trying to "milk" the app store fee. That's a small fraction of their business. They're doing $300 billion in sales (and $100 billion in profit) in just iPhones, it's the most lucrative single product for a private company in world history (Aramco's oil business and Google Search are the only things that match up). The app store is a moat for the iPhone, not their primary financial success. They could make that app store fee 0% and they'd still generate over $100 billion in op income per year. Then they'd get sued by regulators for anti-trust for not charging a fee, claiming they undercut the competition using the iPhone business profits.
Services are roughly a third of the revenue at Apple. Most of the services revenue are taxes on third-party developers, and the payola Google pays Apple for the privilege of Google Search being the default, and to prevent Apple from getting in the search market.
It's where all the revenue growth is at Apple right now. All their hardware businesses are enormous and safe, but basically stagnant. That the majority of revenue is from hardware doesn't mean the future of the company doesn't lie in its ability to extract ever more blood from a stone.
>They're doing $300 billion in sales (and $100 billion in profit) in just iPhones, it's the most lucrative single product for a private company in world history
Yeah, but that slice of the market is in decline for them.
"According to Stocklytics.com, iPhone revenue dropped $2.7 billion year-over-year, totaling $85.2 billion in H1 2024."
Makes sense since everyone and their dog already has an iPhone and keeps them for longer than ever meaning selling more iPhones now is more challenging compared to monetizing all the stuff people buy and do on them.
Just one piece of GE (GE Aerospace) is worth $200 billion now. The stock has tripled in eight months, with the company tracking to $5-6 billion in operating income and looking very healthy. GE Vernova (energy) is worth another $75 billion and is back in the black after years of losses. It's all probably going to be a lot healthier split up. That might be the case for Boeing as well. It's often the best way to restart failed old conglomerates (no Steve Jobs scenario is going to save Boeing).
Are we sure the rot hasn't trickled down to the engineering level yet? We know that once upon a time Boeing had great engineers and had an engineering culture but decades of MBA next-quarter management stands between that old company and the current Boeing. While I'm sure many good engineers still go to work for Boeing, what percentage of all the engineers and engineering managers at the company are top quality? Seems like over the decades that attrition, a failing reputation, and a focus on the wrong things would impact the quality of talent the company hired.
Their business is booming. That significantly overwhelms the concern you're raising.
They have gone from $4.3b in operating income to $14.5b in three years, while their sales nearly doubled. That's an old industrial company boom the likes of which is almost never seen by those types of companies.
By comparison what you're calling catastrophic is entirely trivial. It's not even in the room as a consideration compared to the soaring profits. Nobody is removing a whole board with that kind of profit growth.
> If Deere is so bad buy from competitors, of which there are many.
I somewhat agree with your earlier comment, but this bit is ignoring the systemic issues involved.
Deere is a leader in much of the efficiency technology that allows large-scale farming operations to reach the economy of scale needed to farm the huge multi-thousand (tens of thousands of acres in many cases) grain operations that are slowly but surely taking over food production in the US.
This trend, unabated, is a weird form of monopoly power for lack of a better word. If one manufacturer is more or less the sole-source for the largest corporate farms, and those farming operations are putting smaller ones out of business due to cost pressure - eventually - and likely sooner than later it becomes a too big to fail situation and a systemic national security risk.
This is starting to get into the realm of arms manufacturing. If these trends continue for another decade or three, and then Deere has say a massive IT failure, planting and harvesting operations literally grind to a halt for the top-end equipment entirely reliant on the automation and data harvesting these machines require to operate. People will be at risk for starvation in the event of an extended outage. Farming as a Service has a hidden cost to it many are not seeing in these comments.
I don't agree with disbanding Deere and nationalizing it - however this really needs to be looked at much more than a simple competition issue. It's rapidly becoming a winner-takes-all market, which is subsequently running the smaller operations out of business and putting the US food supply at a systemic risk if nothing is done.
Of course a competitor could somehow battle through the patent forest and capital requirements, but I wouldn't bet our lives on that.
> This trend, unabated, is a weird form of monopoly power for lack of a better word.
Deere controls around 40% of the North American agricultural machinery market [1]. This is so far from anything near any kind of monopoly it's ludicrous to call it so. No court has ever ruled anything anywhere near this low as any kind of monopoly. Everything you wrote predicated on this FUD is invalid.
> This is starting to get into the realm of arms manufacturing.
And this takes the hyperbole into crazy land.
> It's rapidly becoming a winner-takes-all market
Nope. The competition for making such machines is rapidly increasing as it's becoming easier, not harder to make ag equipment. Pressure from a huge host of countries whose economies are becoming first world is adding many other worthy candidates. CNH, Agco, Kubota, Case, New Holland, and many others are already making inroads. EU is the biggest ag market, and Deere has far less market share there than here, where the competitors have already made major inroads, and they're now moving imports and even production into the US.
> It's rapidly becoming a winner-takes-all market
Do you look at market data from investment firms or even at SEC filings from the major players? These statements are not based in any fact.
Because it pretty much never works, and consumers pay the price. It's also going to be near impossible to define well - unless you're just going to target John Deere specifically, which also has historically been a bad idea.
If the goal is some vague "easy to repair" mantra, then tons of things in an advanced economy are going to be hard to repair since technology gets more and more complex. Limiting future inventions to also include "easy to repair," under some complex definition, will limit some innovation. Car engines were once easy to repair, then we added all sorts of emissions control, making them harder, and then as computerized control systems turned out to provide massive benefits (lower gas use, more engine life, better control of timine, fuel injection, and ahost of other things), it again got harder to repair. And engines are simple. Should your internet browser or smart phone allow any neanderthal to consider it easy to repair? Or does an increasingly advanced and complex technological environment reasonably make things harder to repair, even while providing advances that are providing benefits to consumers?
The role of govt is to make an environment where companies compete, and given that JD owns < 40% of the North American Ag Machinery market, it seems there are ample other choices.
Economically, and historically, legislation effectively putting price floors or ceilings on goods (in this case price not as $, but as tech requirements and cutting into company ability to sell goods) pretty much every time comes back to bite consumers. This is econ 101.
It's rather amusing that people have said this about OpenAI - that they essentially had no lead - for about two years non-stop.
The moat as usual is extraordinary scale, resources, time. Nobody is putting $10 billion into the 7th OpenAI clone. Big tech isn't aggressively partnering with the 7th OpenAI clone. The door is already shut to that 7th OpenAI clone (they can never succeed or catch-up), there's just an enormous amount of naivety in tech circles about how things work in the real world: I can just spin up a ChatGPT competitor over the weekend on my 5090, therefore OpenAI have no barriers to entry, etc.
HN used to endlessly talk about how Uber could be cloned in a weekend. It's just people talking about something they don't actually understand. They might understand writing code (or similar) and their bias extends from the premise that their thing is the hard part of the equation (writing the code, building an app, is very far from the hardest part of the equation for an Uber).
Ballmer was never the richest man in the world, not even for a moment.
Right now is about the closest he has ever come to that marker (#8, $148 billion).