That's the inherent nature of the interest rate. Both unemployment and inflation have bad consequences, so the role of the central bank is to balance rates to target a specific inflation rate.
and inflation can continue forever! no problems with that at all, the economy is definitely built on money and not a finite supply of resources constrained by entropy.
I actually don't see a problem with that because what is useful information in a price system is the relative price of things, not the absolute price, which is arbitrary.
The single biggest determinant of people's cost of living, and the single biggest driver of backsliding living standards in many of the most productive cities in the US.
I don't agree with Kirk's politics but it really doesn't take much effort to recognize that no, he didn't say he wanted to live in a country with gun violence. I think an honest interpretation is that he valued the freedom to own guns, despite recognizing that freedom might result in violence or death.
Gun violence doesn’t just happen to other people, it happens randomly and to anyone, even those who choose not to own guns.
Pointing out the irony that he died because of gun violence despite stating that gun violence is an acceptable cost is mean spirited and insensitive in the moment, but not incorrect.
He advocated for circumstances for which this could happen, he probably just assumed it would never happen to him.
I didn’t say Kirk wants this to happen, I said he wants to live in a country in which this happens. He knew gun violence was a trade off for the policies in which he advocated and he was willing to make that trade.
I think a better service to humanity is to excel at your job even if you end up at a socially corrosive org like Meta or Tiktok but donate a decent chunk of your paycheck to effective altruist charities that save lives.
So you mean like buying moral offsets, kind of like how people buy carbon offsets, to achieve morality-neutral jobs? Sounds like a brilliant idea - I'd definitely want to know I'm saving at least as many lives as my company's product is killing. Have you considered recording the morality offsets on a blockchain? Could be a great startup.
A better service to humanity yet is taking that money and spending it on whatever is valuable to yourself, thus providing more people with the opportunity to sustainably work for a living. Capitalism and all that.
The entire point of capitalism is that they are not. That is also the reason why there is no real alternative to the price mechanism wrt. resource allocation at scale.
There is no reason to expect "buy stuff you want" to be more charitable than charity. At a glance, the stuff itself obviously takes up a good chunk of the money and much is going to end up in the hands of people who already have plenty.
You emphasize "sustainably", but how is it more sustainable to give 500k/year to capitalism until you don't make that much / retire / die? In either option, that 500k/year is there until it isn't. With charity, you'd help more people but it would be no more or less sustainable.
“More charitable than charity” is circular – nothing can be more charitable than charity.
Something can however be a lot more valuable than any action by which value is destroyed. Destroying value, by the way, can by definition not be sustainable. Alas, opportunity cost is (also by definition) not directly observable, so it gets dismissed. Hence, e.g., the broken window fallacy.
You don’t “give to capitalism”, you engage in voluntary transactions with other individuals and legal entities, such that they are a net (expected) gain in value for all parties involved.
Sounds like completely self serving BS. I don't understand what possible definition of 'service to humanity' that could be true under.
EA charities estimate that the cost of malaria prevention that will save a person's life for 1 year is ~$150. So what is a 'better service for humanity'? Buying yourself one night of sushi & wine or donating one year of life to somebody who wouldn't have it otherwise?
In addition to being unnecessarily aggressive, this is a strawman and whataboutism.
Food for thought: Do you think slavery is or was a “service to humanity”? Because that is what you are advocating: Forcing some set of people to work for free for another.
Also why do you think it has become so cheap in the first place?
This is not to say that eradicating malaria might not make a lot of sense by the way. But you are being incredibly disingenuous, and your argument is based on bad premises.
Grocery stores on average make ~1-4% profit on revenue. Hungary has a sales tax of 27%. Do you think that if Hungary eliminated the sales tax that Hungarian grocery stores would make 28-31% profits?
Startup founders can choose between many models of funding, VCs, etc. Starups cannot choose between different ways of accessing willing customers over iOS, they have to comply with a %30 cut and a jungle of regulations that act in Apple's interest.
These two examples aren't the same, even just on the basis of market power.
Startups aren’t paying 30% of sales unless they have more then $1 million in revenue coming through the App Store, they are selling access to digital goods and even then, they can still sell access to subscriptions and services outside of the App Store and now they can link directly to their website from the App Store thanks to the courts ruling - at least in the US.
Many startups are still losing money at $1M ARR. So getting a bump up to 30% of revenue at $1M can be catastrophic.
Investors don't want large percentages of pre-profit money being siphoned off by Apple.
Generally speaking, an optimized win-win fee would be some percentage of profits, not revenue.
That might be far too difficult to manage, accounting wise. But we can safely say that 30% of revenue, would translate to an extreme percentage of profit. Apple is extorting from many companies.
One sign of anticompetitive behavior is when a company is leveraging things in their favor so hard, it seems quite plausible that they are actually harming themselves. Killing of developers, by charging massive fees even to money losing developers, is not a good long term strategy.
But the power to extract money even from those it causes real pain, is hard to turn down when quarterly numbers keep coming up.
> Starups cannot choose between different ways of accessing willing customers over iOS
What? They can offer an SPA, or a traditional web page. They can offer a hardware device. They can make an android app compelling enough to convert users.
You are really trying to say that for a startup trying to build software, say a productivity app or whatever, they should consider launching their own hardware device? They are very different things and would basically make indie development impossible (or really any software company that can't raise hundreds of millions to billions)
There is a limit to this sort of logic though. Don't get me wrong, I'm generally pro free markets. But:
A) Apple's policies make some products completely unviable (anything with a gross margin less than 30%). Even for products at say 40% gross margin, Apple as a storefront is taking 75% of the gross margin pool (ie 30% to Apple, 10% to developer). This in my view is direct consumer harm.
B) Apple acts egregiously and restricts what should be basic free speech. For instance, app developers not being able to even mention they have to pay Apple (let alone being able to direct customers to their own website etc). To me this is the biggest one - I could probably live with everything else more if developers at least could show customers where their fees were going etc.
C) Apple has changed the rules over time, or at least how they enforce the rules (by trying to force more and more apps to pay the 30% - eg what they did to Patreon)
This hasn’t been true in months in the US because of the courts ruling. Right now, just looking at two apps, you can click on “Buy book” from the Kindle app and be redirected to Amazon’s website and download the Netflix app, click on “Get Started” and create an account.
Just because people will go along with something because they have no other choice, it doesn't mean it's a fair business practice that we should allow.
Apple's deal is still an acceptable business proposition because there aren't any alternatives. Android users don't spend much on apps compared to iPhone users. It's an ok market, but not a great one, and in the US, if you aren't on the iPhone, then you aren't relevant, period.
Maybe if there was an actual competitive market on iOS for app stores, we'd see what app developers actually thought was a good business proposition, not the only take-it-or-leave-it (but if you leave it there's no way to be successful) proposition they have now.
People clearly have other choices here: develop for Android, develop for the web, create a telephony-based or text-response system, operate in bricks-n-mortar format, etc.
Apple with a 90% commission would still be a better business proposition.Did they earn that or are they at that point a monopoly on half a domain of tech?
Is that a better business proposition for a prospective app developer? GP was arguing that the alternatives to the App Store commission were far worse. Under a 90% commission scheme, they're probably both unviable.
> would basically make indie development impossible
We aren’t talking about indie development though. People like to paint a picture of a small, scrappy startup or beleaguered solo dev being held back by Apple’s crushing 30%, but that isn’t the case.
Unless you are earning more than a million dollars a year through the App Store alone, you don’t pay 30%, you pay 15%. And if you earn more than that, you still only pay 15% for long-term subscribers. And of course, all those SaaS companies where the app is just an interface for the larger service pay 0%.
As soon as you start talking about “Apple’s 30%”, you reduce the scope of the argument to the tiny fraction of developers with millions in revenue.
If you do actually want to talk about indie development, you should be talking about “Apple’s 15%”.
Say you're a team of 3. Your game takes 2 years to develop. You spend on salary for 3x2 years. You've spent ~$600,000 so far. Let's assume you haven't had any other sources of operational costs like software licenses for your art tools (3D modelling, 2D drawing, music production, sound production, game engine), marketing expenditure, development hardware, outside contracting, and a number of other things.
If you pull $800,000 in the first year Apple will take $120,000. Your net profit is $80,000. Apple has taken over half your profit.
If you pull $1,200,000 in the first year Apple will take $210,000. I'm going to assume that Apple still only takes 15% on the first $1million. Your net profit is $390,000. About a third of your profit has gone to Apple now.
The carve-out for small revenues is not some panacea. Fixed cost overheads for small teams will swallow the platitude very fast. Video games is a high risk, hits based industry. Apple's tax adds the most risk to small ventures, the kind of ventures that are going to produce innovative high risk content, making them even more risky adding more difficulty to acquiring finance.
So if we want to talk about Apple's 15% it's actually worse.
This is not what people have in mind when you talk about poor little indie devs being unable to cope with 30%. We’re talking about a well-funded operation that can run for years without revenue.
> So if we want to talk about Apple's 15% it's actually worse.
As someone who worked at a company that tried to do this, years ago, that's hilariously laughable, and either you're just incredibly unaware of what that sort of thing takes, or you're arguing in bad faith.
And if you think SPAs or regular websites on mobile Safari can give you the same experience and hardware access as a native app, I'm not sure what to tell you.
> They can make an android app compelling enough to convert users.
Sure, right, now you're just spouting fantasy stories. (And I say this as an Android user.)
Can we try to not turn HN into this? I come to this forum to find domain experts with interesting commentary, instead of emotionally charged low effort food fights.
The problem with building more homes and bringing down the cost of housing isn't a couple billionaires as much as a massive geriatric class of NIMBY homeowners.
Housing as an investment creates all kinds of terribly misaligned political incentives for local democracies. A land value tax would've helped by shifting people's nest egg from the value of their homes to their accumulated savings from income.
As it is, NIMBYism is likely the biggest driver of rising costs of living, rising homelessness, rising municipal debt, and generational class divides.
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