This is pure speculation, but is it possible that Android never would have been successful (or as successful) if they did not bow to the carriers?
By taking carrier-friendly positions they built a symbiotic relationship that resulted in the carriers being happy to promote their phones.
Apple didn’t bow to the carriers. You can speculate that only Apple could have done that, but Google’s deference to carriers has continued with RCS. Given their market position now, I think it’s just a preference in doing business.
The thing is that Android is open source (at least nominally). So having Google refuse carries the ability to customize it would be like having the Linux project say that companies can’t ship their own distros.
Google could have applied pressure on carries via some sort of “Certified Android” label but realistically this is very different from iOS/Apple where the hardware and software are closed and made by the same company.
Google Play Services, which is damn near essential these days, is not open source by any means.
They might have had a harder time applying pressure on carriers early in Android's lifetime, but there is so much momentum in the ecosystem now that they can do it easily IMO.
I don’t think we’re anywhere near the level of general robotics and intelligence that would obsolete human labor.
None of the most labor intensive industries have been able to fully automate, agriculture, mining, construction, healthcare, none are close to taking humans out of the loop.
Not only does the technology need to exist, it needs to be cheaper to develop and operate than the low income human it replaces.
Many countries are starting to see a critical lack of farmers, fishermen, hunters, and other people working in agriculture. Healthcare is also starting to suffer.
The robot automation will happen, probably either in our or the next generation's lifetimes, because there just aren't enough workers either due to lack of will (poor pay) or lack of literal humans.
I don’t believe that necessity will dictate our ability to create these technologies, the challenges are significant. Capitalism adjusting for reduced supply and greater demand by increasing pay is something more plausible as it has proven to work constantly.
This definitely requires some citations. There is no evidence that you are presenting that supports the 2-5% claim.
I don’t think you are fully understanding the impact of price collusion or the suit presented here. The DOJ very clearly thinks this is anticompetitive.
TBF your contention that the impact of price collusion also requires citations. And the DOJ has thought a lot of things, however their track record in court has been not exactly been stellar so I'm not sure how much of a signal that is.
Unless a certain company interferes with market forces — aka the whole purpose of this lawsuit.
If you need a place to live, what’re you going to do, be homeless? They have enough of the market in some cities to impact the market in a way that distorts the prices for everyone. Market forces cannot operate when companies act anticompetitively
Supply will never exceed demand by very much because unlike a chair it's a very expensive good to sit on for long. Nobody profits by "overbuilding" so they won't do it nor defect on pricing given a collective target which benefits all owners.
People aren't pool balls bouncing around on a table they are fully capable of serving their interests.
Its weird to argue against the obvious conclusion that price fixing increases price
An anecdote does not prove that RealPage doesn’t have a greater impact in other markets… That’s just not how logic works.
You also fail to consider that rents may have fallen further if RealPage was not in use.
Honestly the strongest argument I've heard that these algorithms are anticompetitive is "The DoJ thinks they are". So maybe there's some non-public information of anticompetitive behavior.
We don't know how many housing units use Realpage pricing algorithms in 2024, but in 2017 when Realpage bought the tech, it was being used in 1.5 million rentals (https://www.realpage.com/news/realpage-to-acquire-lease-rent...) and there were 43 million rentals in the US, which means nationally they had less than 4% marketshare.
Obviously, cartel behavior (raising prices above market) does not work if you have 4% of the market. Perhaps their sales have gone up 20X in 7 years and they have enough market power for cartel behavior (doubtful)? Perhaps they have a low marketshare nationally, but they have a high marketshare in a few specific markets? Maybe, lets see what the DoJ says.
>Perhaps they have a low marketshare nationally, but they have a high marketshare in a few specific markets? Maybe, lets see what the DoJ says.
I think it's very much this. National market share is meaningless. I live in Northern Virginia -- some SFH that rents in another market is meaningless for someone looking for an apartment here. In this area, it seems very much that all large multi-unit apartment buildings use RealPage. Individually owned condos that are rented out exist, but of course their quantity is very tiny compared to the number of apartment towers/complexes. SFHs, likewise, are poor substitutes, because someone in the price range of a studio, 1 or 2 bedroom unit isn't going to rent a SFH and splitting a SFH brings problems of its own.
From the press release: "The complaint separately alleges that RealPage has unlawfully maintained its monopoly over commercial revenue management software for multi-family dwellings in the United States, in which RealPage commands approximately 80% market share."
That’s 80% of companies who are using revenue management software are using Realpage, not that 80% of rental units are using Realpage revenue management software
... yeah that's pretty much all of them minus some mom and pops who manage themselves. And from personal experience those mom and pops are selling out to management companies now so a whole neighborhood of single family rentals might be actually controlled by just one or two companies.
"The Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division — for the third time in the span of a year — recently failed to convince a jury that alleged agreements to fix or stabilize labor markets should be punished criminally."
Palantir runs on the customer’s own cloud, or a major cloud provider of the customer’s choosing in the region of their choosing. There’s no data aggregation/sharing across customers, it works similar to AWS.
If you properly handle not returning/using nulls in your checkstyle rules and don’t allow nulls to be deserialized anywhere (forcing the use of Optional), then you can pretty much eliminate NPE.
I can’t remember the last time I encountered one by using the proper compile time checks. It does need to be enforced organization-wide, and not partially with annotations, but if you can make that change then you can code in Java without the mental overhead of null.
Does no good when interacting with the standard library, where things like collection methods return null for "not found". All that discipline and organization you're talking about? That's a compiler's job, and if it won't do so, I'll find a language that does. I don't spend much time griping about Java these days though, because I've had many such languages in my arsenal for some time now. Ironically in most of them I use null quite freely because it's now a distinct type and no longer a landmine.
Usually you’re using a lot of Optional and Streams, so the collection method returns null inside a .map() and you don’t need to think about it.
To be clear, it is handled by the checkstyle rules at compile time, so you won’t accidentally forget.
Inputs to standard libraries will obviously never NPE if you pass in a non-null value.
For outputs, a lot of standard collection .get() calls are unnecessary when you’re working with small collections or Optionals, where you simply use stream, filter, ifPresent.
Or simply wrap the return with Optional.ofNullable, checkstyle will not accept it if you don’t.
Yeah, if you have perfect dilligence, you can work around many language's weaknesses. But we're in an imperfect world. It's not easy to influence my coworker's code style and impossible to do with other teams or people who worked on my projects in the past and left since, yet I still have to work with their code.
> then you can pretty much eliminate NPE.
NPEs is only one kind of cost incurred by the lack of null safety. The other is all the unnecessary "if (x == null) {" boilerplate code caused by the uncertainty and defensive programming, which increases complexity and worsens readability.
If you have insufficient material how can you capture the king? Checkmate is by definition one move before forced capture of the king, the game doesn’t change by making it end one move later.
I was reading up on how this worked. It’s a really good idea, and a step in the right direction 100%… cloudflare is flexing a little and this mainly works because so many people are on cloudflare.
It never ceases to amaze me how complicated privacy is.
From cloudflares blog [1]
“ What about the IP address?
While both DNS queries and the TLS SNI extensions can now be protected by on-path attackers, it might still be possible to determine which websites users are visiting by simply looking at the destination IP addresses on the traffic originating from users’ devices. Some of our customers are protected by this to a certain degree thanks to the fact that many Cloudflare domains share the same sets of addresses, but this is not enough and more work is required to protect end users to a larger degree. Stay tuned for more updates from Cloudflare on the subject in the future”
My primary mechanism to load books on my Kindle is via emailing ePubs, granted, I'm probably in the minority of users but I couldn't ask for an easier workflow.
Aren’t these taxations generally regressive given poor people spend ~100% of their income and ultra rich people spend <1%.
So you’re taxing the poor person on all of their money but barely taxing the rich person.
Profit can be manipulated. Creating a giant bureaucracy of overpaid administrators and middlemen can siphon off any amount of money while declaring no profit.
You mean costs can be inflated? Yes, the American healthcare system is extremely inefficient but that doesn't help the shareholders of those insurance companies at all.
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