This is definitely not true. Microsoft has an absolute stranglehold on enterprises. They're the #2 cloud provider. The MSFT productivity software biz isn't going anywhere as their bundle is feature complete and they are able to effectively cross sell. The OpenAI partnership has mostly been a PR/marketing play up to this point, though I'm sure it will be driving major revenue in the years to come. In other words, the OpenAI parternship is not driving major rev/profit yet.
Simons has been out of day-to-day management for quite some time. He was succeeded by co-CEOs who were then themselves succeeded, IIRC. (These are my recollections from reading The Man Who Solved the Market). Apparently his management style was always pretty hands off and they operated multiple successful quant strategies that were led by others. Their Medallion fund returned 22% after (huge) fees in 2022 according to the WSJ. [1] That's the employee only fund that has blown the doors off for 30+ years. They do have a few other funds that manage much more $ and manage external money that have never performed at Medallion's level. In other words, it seems like succession will not be a major risk for them in the near term.
Maybe because it led to a bunch of USA-is-great chest-beating, and a bunch of Europe-is-great chest-beating, and very little discussion of the actual content of the article.
I was 80% of the way through the comments before I saw any mention of the article's point. (Though I did see two comments claiming that they didn't understand it, which seems hard to believe, given that it was both simple and stated about three times.)
So: Flagged because it led to a lousy discussion, not because it was a lousy article. But that actually seems to be on HN rather than on the article, at least in my humble opinion...
> the huge difference in compensation for technology talent
This isn't a single lever that can be pulled independently. You need highly fluid labor markets that force companies to pay competitive efficiency wages (i.e. fewer/weaker/no unions), competitive and innovative companies, lower regulation and government bureaucratic interference, ambitious and career focused labor force, etc. etc.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem that, at its root, stems from culture (IMHO).
> In SF you frequently hear big tech people talking how hard they work, while they queue 30mins for a coffee at Blue Bottle and chitchatting there for another 20mins.
Gotta be the Googlers. Elon and Zuck have shown the light to most tech cos and they are emulating to one degree or another. But Google seems unwilling/unable to deal effectively with the WLB'ers. After all, how can they conduct all of their political activities if work is getting in the way?
India banned TikTok (without the option to divest) and everything was fine. And they didn't limit the ban to TikTok:
"TikTok wasn’t a one-off case. Today, India has banned over 500 Chinese apps to date." [1]
If ByteDance won't sell, let them shutdown. It is truly baffling to me that anyone would defend a company's right to operate freely in the U.S. when it is controlled by a brutal autocracy that is also an emerging adversary.
In India users that had it installed could continue to use it. And downloading it in India is trivial. On iPhone it's as simple as changing your region, on Android you just need to install the APK (installer) - which TikTok makes conveniently available on their website. I learned this from a quick search of 'how to install TikTok in India' which is apparently quite the common search in India. [1] I tried to dig up some data on how many Indian TikTok users there are. Probably unsurprisingly, that's not available. It seems fairly safe to say it's going to be quite a hefty number though!
So it was a toothless ban. By contrast, US wanted to have their cake and eat it too - keep TikTok and gain complete control over it. And while I know basically nothing about Indian law I'm fairly certain they have a much better legal argument in the US as well. So I don't think the situations have much in common.
The ban just doesn't apply to end users, but also to advertisers and content producers in the USA. That would have some impact, what is the point of distributing your app if you can't make any money on it.
> By contrast, US wanted to have their cake and eat it too - keep TikTok and gain complete control over it.
The law just specifies that it can't be owned by Chinese. A german company could buy it instead.
> And while I know basically nothing about Indian law I'm fairly certain they have a much better legal argument in the US as well.
That is making a lot of assumptions (I don't why they banned it, but I'm sure their reason must be better than the USA's...because they are India and the USA is worse?).
Doesn’t China also demand complete control of foreign apps in their country? Correct me if I’m wrong but my understanding is that the CCP demands specific changes to or outright removal of apps all the time.
In general, yes. This [1] is the first paragraph of the first article of their constitution: "The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. The socialist system is the basic system of the People’s Republic of China. Disruption of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited."
They are a self described democratic dictatorship with a system that openly and voluntarily chooses to sacrifice individual liberty and freedom for what they see as the collective good. That is their right as a sovereign power, but it is not a system I would like to live under. And any movement in this sort of direction is something that I think should be actively opposed.
It's a bit different with China. China has a mandated one party system, but as for individuals they do have normal and fair elections that I think even the US could learn something from. Basically at the smallest segment of society you have groups of something like 2000 people who have a local elected representative who has significant power to actually get things done. Those representatives then elect representatives at a higher tier, and so on up until you have the Politburo Standing Committee electing the President/Secretary of the CCP.
I think this system is pretty nice in lots of ways because it lets local representatives focus on local things, while high level representatives can focus on broad national interests. It also means peoples votes are always extremely important and you're going to be quite 'close' (literally and figuratively) to your representative. Of course the obvious downside is that in China you don't even get to directly vote for the President, but on the other hand - that is similar to many parliamentary systems used throughout Europe. Anyhow, it's an interesting system! Our first past the post district based system is completely broken and dysfunctional, but the people most benefited from it are the only ones who could fix it, so it's not going anywhere anytime soon. But it's fun to at least consider alternatives!
The funny part is that they give you something like 31 names and tell you to pick 30 of them that you want to be elected (so one person gets left out). Early in his career, Xi Jinping actually lost his only direct election this way (they ignored the results and gave him the post anyways). Even at the lowest level, there are definitely never any one on one elections where two people can campaign for the same office, the system doesn't allow for that.
> This [1] is the first paragraph of the first article of their constitution: "The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.
Technically, freedom of speech, religion, press is guaranteed in the Chinese constitution. But China is not a rule of law country so these rights are not enforced in any manner beyond how the government sees fit.
When I disagree with a "TikTok ban", I'm defending my right to install what I want on my phone/computer/etc. I don't even use TikTok, but I think this sets a shitty precedent.
If the problem with TikTok is data collection, we should legislate bounds on all data collection and make everyone safer. If the problem with TikTok is addictive algorithmic feeds, we should legislate limits on those for all platforms and probably improve everyone's life.
think it sets a shitty precedent that anyone from any country and distribute whatever weird product they want to and as long as people want it. if it isnt addressed.
maybe i would think differently if it wasnt banned everywhere else. and china didnt ban every western tech company.
isis recruitment apps, wholesale fent stright from china apps. whatever its my right! going against something blindly just because you want the freedom to do it whether or not you will is odd no? shouldnt you use context.
Although information is in its name, it gets its full meaning from its suffix.
MISinformation is the missing of information or the mis-leading of an audience by spinning purposefully false rhetoric and delivering arguments for a false narrativvve.
It is very closely related to propaganda, but with a different aim. The aim here is not to have someone look good but to destabelize and subvert.
So although it is containing information in its name, neither it nor propaganda can be labeled information.
Who would want to consume lies freely anyways?
Also, nice addendum of the first amendment btw., the right of US citizens to express their opinions is not being curtailed here. It is just a medium that is under scrutiny and, I might add, for a very very good reason.
I'm not really spinning anything. This is likely the defense TikTok will be using in court. The 1st amendment covers the right to receive information, and it's funny you bring up propaganda because it has even been ruled it covers the right to receive foreign propaganda:
There should be some kind of reciprocity though. If Idaho didn’t allow drivers holding California drivers license to drive in Idaho, I’m sure California will swiftly ban drivers with Idaho licenses in California as well.
If U.S. companies can’t operate in China PR, China PR companies should not have any expectation of unfettered access to U.S. markets.
Also, corporations are NOT people, no matter what SCOTUS says.
> why haven't we seen mass death from repeated 35℃ breaches?
Because we haven't seen very many 35℃ wet bulb temperature breaches yet. The nominal air temperature is much higher than that all the time around the world, but it's only when there is very high humidity at that temp that humans start to overheat.
IIRC there have only been a few instances so far where the web bulb temp limit has been breached, e.g. some instances around the Persian Gulf, and maybe also in Mexico near the Gulf of California (not sure about the latter if it's even been breached yet, but I know it's at risk).
The breach is in wet-bulb temperature, not dry-bulb temperature. When you hear weather reports cover the temperature, then it's going to be the dry-bulb temperature--the actual temperature of the air.
Wet-bulb temperature is the minimum temperature you can reach by evaporative cooling (i.e., sweating). When wet-bulb temperature gets too close to core body temperature, you are physically incapable of shedding heat if you are not in air-conditioning, and how close it needs to be depends on how good health you are in.
But we actually have seen deaths in previous heat waves, which largely didn't even breach 30C wet-bulb. The 2003 European heat wave caused about 70,000 people to die, for example.
Do you have data on the demographic breakdown? The papers i have seen have the overwhelmong majority of those deaths in the 80 plus demographic, which is not anywhere near equivalent to an 18 to 50 year old death when doing the cost benefit analysis on any of the mitigation or avoidance policies we could enact
Please don't confuse the heat in Death Valley with humid heat. Don't get me wrong, that Death Valley heat will kill you, but as long as you have water and shade you will survive.
dear fact-impaired readers - global temperature records are carefully kept by a multitude of authoritative sources, and increasingly so..
the Year 2023 was the Hottest Year on Record to date globally.. each month of 2023 (edit maybe not jan-feb?) was also the hottest recorded globally. The hottest day cumulatively across the world was in 2023. The nine hottest years on record globally were the last nine years.
Please use librarianship and science skills for factual information. multiple references available for the search-impaired
I assume that you're alluding to the air conditioner, which was invented in 1901? The first home installation was in 1914, but that wasn't the date of the invention.
> limiting global warming to 1.5 °C would prevent most of the tropics from reaching the wet-bulb temperature of the human physiological limit of 35 °C.
We've had one year at the level of warming that is not yet expected to yield mass death from wet bulb events.
Give it time. There's no reason to think that the current warming trend will slow, stop, or reverse itself in the near term.
Why is there “no reason?” This has happened repeatedly throughout history. Climate has always changed. The only difference now is that “preventing” climate change is a huge industry.
Of course climate has changed in the past, but over geological time scales. We're witnessing change in real time, over a period of decades. It's the rate of change in climate that is accelerating.
"Maybe it'll just -waves hands- magically happen" is "no reason". Saying "climate has changed in the past and therefore there is reason to believe that it will change in this particular way, in the future" does not logically follow.
Climate has changed repeatedly throughout history. Every time a temperature increase has changed to a temperature decrease, this must be preceded by the rate of temperature increase decreasing.
We observe the rate of temperature increase, continuing to increase.
Thus there is reason to believe that it will get hotter for some time, before it again gets colder.
Seriously the people who say "there is money to be made by lying about climate change" and then pointing to the few millions of dollars available in public research into climate and NOT the trillions of dollars from multiple countries in selling energy in the form of carbon bonds are just goofy.
These are the kind of people that had to cheat off you to pass biology yet insist that "the immune system works like this"
The 1.5 degrees are the average heatup over the globe, it varies across the regions - in Europe we have a higher raise, but we are not near the unliveable conditions, though we have plenty of heat deaths already. And of course, there is air condition. So even if temperatures reach dangerous levels, few people will experience it in full force.
I see this as nothing but good news (if it's all true). Unlike in the early 2000s, there are plenty of viable alternatives to Google. The dawn of generative AI could spawn even more. So this means Google is intentionally undermining their competitive advantage at a moment when they least should. Hurray! Either Google will course correct and give us great search or it will bleed users to the likes of Bing, Startpage, Duck Duck Go, Perplexity, etc. etc.
"permanently bans BloomTech from all consumer-lending activities and bans Allred from any student-lending activities for ten years"
"ordering BloomTech and Allred to cease collecting payments on income share loans for graduates who did not have a qualifying job, eliminate finance changes for certain agreements, and allow students the option to withdraw without penalty"
This order seems like a death sentence. If ISAs are defined as consumer-lending, which the CFPB clearly says they are, BloomTech cannot recruit new customers. And they cannot collect on 50% of their outstanding loans (if the quoted internal placement rate is true).
The CFPB, like every federal regulatory agency, has only direct civil enforcement powers.
They refer criminal matters to the Department of Justice, which usually takes significantly longer before handing down charges, and does not usually disclose the existence of an open investigation until and unless it issues an indictment.
reply