ProMarket

> Is this how they're going to steward AGI as well? Take it to places where monetization is the best first? Yes! You bet it is. Sam said it so himself. He promised investors they’d make AGI and then ask it how to make money. https://www.startupbell.net/post/sam-altman-told-investors-bluntly-he-… They also define AGI as “generates $100 billion in profits”. https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-a-financia… > This is a nonprofit "for good of humanity" company btw But it’s not. They explicitly tried to become a for-profit. https://www.promarket.org/2025/05/06/openai-abandons-move-to-for-profi… Don’t be fooled, Sam and company give zero shits about “the good of humanity”. All they want is money and power.

Your inclusion of the timeline relating to WWI made me wonder how much of that war (and WWII) were about economic disparity. I found this interesting article on the topic: https://www.promarket.org/2018/01/03/inequality-imperialism-first-worl… It seems reasonable to assume that a similar surplus of investable funds with no where left to spend it will create similar conflict both here and in space (given how many of our ultra elite are pushing into outer space for the next great fortune).

Thomas Philippon (NYU professor) has nice new book "The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets" https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237544 Here is an interview with Philippon that has some of the main points: https://promarket.org/2019/12/09/the-lack-of-competition-has-deprived-…

If you are a capitalist, you should be pro-acquisition (i.e. of smaller firms) and anti-merger (for larger firms), because mergers are a form of crony capitalism that leads to reduced product quality and market dysfunction. First, merging firms reduce the number of products they sell, with the effects materializing one year after the M&A and accelerating over the next several years. Second, merging firms tend to drop and add products at the periphery of their joint product portfolio. Third, the net effect is an increase in the similarity among the products that firms offer following a merger or acquisition. from: https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/02/merged-firms-offer-less-product-v… This finding has been consistently true since people have started measuring merger outcomes, "we find that each merger is associated with a quality decrease (increase) in markets where the merging firms had (had no) pre-merger competition with each other, and the quality change can have a U-shaped relationship with pre-merger competition intensity. Consumer gains/losses associated with quality changes, which we monetize, are substantial " – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016771871730112… It is doubtful that merging two companies would have improved the EU's capability to compete with Chinese state operators. On the other hand, lowering the capital threshold to create a new entrant would definitely improve the EU's competitive position and…

>> Just low[sic] how bootleg booze largely doesn't exist outside of prohibition since the market functions. Tell me that you hang out with law abiding citizens without telling me... Moonshine, home brew... people are out there sticking it too the man as much as they can. If you have made home made cider, or beer, or yogurt, pickles, canned anything you know that its a labor but the product is better and far cheaper than what you can buy. Convenience, quality, ease of use... People will pay a massive premium for these things. This (to this dismay of HN) is the Apple model. You can bleed the customer if they love you, if you have a good product. This was a problem in early film, and the paramount decree was a thing: https://www.promarket.org/2022/12/12/the-paramount-decrees-and-the-der… One would think that this should apply to streaming services, but sadly no, they get treated like network television did (does). And I know that one of you will glom on to the paramount decree as an argument for the iPhone App Store shenanigans of late. Sadly they aren't remotely close to each other Apple isnt restricting your timing, or telling you what your price should be.

It is not the US but the Fanjul Brothers from Cuba who run the sugar cartel. And are major donors. [..]The Fanjuls are most well-known for being sugar barons. Prior to fleeing Cuba and settling in Florida following Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, the family had, over generations, amassed a fortune through growing and marketing sugar. When they moved to the U.S. they kept this business tradition alive, and with great success: the family bought lands, planted sugar canes, built factories, created partnerships, and expanded to other countries. The Fanjuls own about 400,000 acres of sugar cane plantations, half of which are in Florida and the other half in the Dominican Republic. Their main sugar holding company is American Sugar Refining, Inc. (ASR), which is a partnership between the Fanjul family’s Florida Crystals and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida. American Sugar Refining controls refineries by ownership or shareholder status in four states and six countries. The company’s American brands include Domino, Florida Crystals, Redpath, Tate & Lyle, and C&H. [..] https://www.promarket.org/2016/09/19/sugar-industry-buys-academia-poli… There is actually more to this. It’s worth rabbitholing for Fanjul Brothers and the Cuban Sugar Cartel. There is enough material here for an opulent political thriller K-drama stylesque series here.

Leans back in rocking chair, tamps pipe. When I was younger I used to code in C and C++. Borland compiler and IDE tools were my favourite. From what I recall Microsoft stomped all over them. It was my first introduction Big Tech. I loved DOS (yes DOS!) and I was getting to learn Windows but I felt that Microsoft was stifling its competition by abusing its dominance of the PC OS market. I was young and naive and had never heard of Free (as in freedom) Software and Open Source was a term that was yet to be coined. (I'm going somewhere relevant with this.) When Linux came along it made a few small ripples, I jumped on board when it was maybe six or seven years old – a beat up PC running Slackware was being used as a router connected to an ISDN line in a business park I interned at. Some dude explained roughly how it worked and gave me a burnt CD. I had to figure out how to load CD drivers manually, compile the kernel manually, I learned so much. And in time I learned about FOSS and GNU and Stallman and the GPL. I thought, wow – that's a neat hack – using the legal system to guarantee freedoms. Giving people control over their devices, and way less of an opportunity for a big company to stifle it. I was a convert. We're been at the Ad/Data Lock-in/Surveillance Tech equivalent of Stallman and the mythical printer for over a decade now. I personally think our modern Borland moment was when Facebook was allowed to buy Instagram (2012). That should never have been allowed by…

Perhaps obvious was not a good choice. Anyways: I would say Google is as close to a natural monopoly as the Bell System was in 1956. If you came to me and said “Hey, I want to start a company to compete with Google in search,” I would say you’re out of your mind and don’t waste your energy or your time or your money, there’s just no way. Classic economics would say that if there’s a business in which there are 35 percent net margins, that would attract a huge amount of new capital to capture some of that, and none of that has happened. That tells you there’s something wrong. From: https://promarket.org/google-close-natural-monopoly-bell-system-1956/ Water companies are a utility because there's a high cost to laying the pipes and the more pipes you lay, the more people you service, the more pipes you can afford to lay. It's near impossible for an upstart water company to come in and displace the incumbent. Search companies should be a utility because there's a high cost to gathering the data needed to drive good results and the more data you gather, the better results you give, the more data you gather. It's near impossible for an upstart search company to come in and displace the incumbent.

People say this, but AI artists keep getting listens on music platforms, doing at least as well as human artists if the listener is making a blind choice. https://www.promarket.org/2026/05/04/consumers-prefer-ai-music-until-t…

I'm not sure I'd agree. https://www.promarket.org/2017/05/09/google-close-natural-monopoly-bel…

There is some compelling research from Princeton that for 90%+ of the American voting population, there opinions have zero impact on federal policy. It's all lobby driven money. “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba And they actively vote against the will of their constituents 35% of the time. http://promarket.org/2017/06/16/study-politicians-vote-will-constituen…

“TI’s calculator ecosystem facilitated a needed educational reform and created training resources for math teachers. Its emergence as a national standard simplified math education, reduced teacher training costs, and contributed to teacher job mobility. Educators, who may have taught for decades, even preferred the lack of innovation. Additionally, students have been able to take standardized tests and enroll in STEM courses in college without needing to switch calculators.” https://www.promarket.org/2024/04/08/tis-calculator-monopoly-offers-le… (Also, TI supports RPN. It also supports PN and infix notation.)

It will probably be confusing until the delta of monetary damage to drones outpaces the value of campaign contributions. Until then, we have articles to look forward to highlighting how "unreasonable" this behavior is so the window of manufactured consent can move to justify the new reality. This is not a conspiracy, just the alignment of capital incentives that externalize current notions that could be argued as believed to be within the realm of "the public good." No one is paid to advocate for common sense, privacy, or the right to shoot the free targets that avail themselves over your property. See also: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797 https://www.promarket.org/2019/02/13/social-media-clickwraps-manufactu…

it looks like all similar/recent trials were already bench trials[1]. That is not to express that such trials should or should not be tried by jury. "Unlike all the other recent cases federal and state governments have brought against Big Tech, the DOJ’s latest complaint includes a demand for a jury trial. This jury demand is extremely unusual—government civil antitrust claims are almost always tried to a judge—and it raises a host of strategic challenges for the parties as well as broader policy issues about the role of juries in complex antitrust matters." [1] https://www.promarket.org/2023/04/26/understanding-the-dojs-decision-t… - looks to be Chicago School affiliated but pretty neutral.

In the US at least, I tend to think that was the last gasp of an old anti-trust regime that had basically run out of gas by then. The 80's saw a conservative revolution that extinguished a lot of worker and consumer protections. https://www.promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathered-the-new-…

Since Carter/Reagan, FTC has historically not challenged these mergers because FTC and other legal agencies got swallowed up by Robert Bork who basically convinced them that monopolies are actually good. So FTC and other agencies basically listened to paid off economists who were like "This merger will be fine for consumers" https://www.promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathered-the-new-… Lina Khan has changed FTC which is why you see wave of this action but obviously anything law, it's very slow going.

Yes, artists have the wonderful choice of being able to sign for one of three labels, with no meaningful distinction between the deals any of them offer, because that's just how oligopolies roll. And they collude^Whave deals with spotify. Maybe spotify and the labels suck? https://www.promarket.org/2022/10/03/why-streaming-doesnt-pay/

Delaware resident here. It's been happening for years: > In Newark, Delaware’s third-biggest city, a similar rule allowed one property manager to vote 31 times in a local referendum in 2018, one for each of the LLCs their company owned https://www.promarket.org/2022/05/23/delaware-the-state-where-companie…

Version without broken images: https://www.promarket.org/2019/11/20/the-uber-bubble-why-is-a-company-…

The "consumer welfare" standard is a fairly recent (1980s) reinterpretation, and the switch to it happened because of large business lobbying. The original intent of American trust-busting laws was very much to prevent capturing so much market share that competition becomes irrelevant. https://promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathered-the-new-gild… And that original interpretation was what worked on the original monopolies (oil etc). The sooner we get back to that, the better.

Do we know it because of 50 years of studies funded by the sugar industry that tried to pin the blame on saturated fats? https://promarket.org/2016/09/19/sugar-industry-buys-academia-politici…

It's underreported (or justifyably not being picked up by journalists). Capitalisn't podcast had an episode on it as well. This is the original article of the Microsoft guy: https://promarket.org/2020/05/28/how-market-design-economists-engineer… Promarket has more articles as well.

According to an oft referenced Princeton study, the will of the population has almost exactly zero impact on congressional voting: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 According to a couple of other studies, states choose policies their citizens want only 59% of the time and politicians, overall, vote against the will of the people they represent 35% of the time: https://promarket.org/study-politicians-vote-will-constituents-35-perc… Unless you're using large scale money and influence to interact directly with politicians, neither your will or your direction have any meaning.

I think it was Stigler, the nobel laureate, that had done quite a bit or research on monopolys and the effect of mergers and acquisitions on jobs. https://promarket.org/stigler-monopolies-competition-tough-weed-not-de… It was back in 2001 that I remember reading a newspaper article on this

Yep, don't forget that market friendly and business friendly (and especially big business) are two different things. https://promarket.org/donald-trumps-economic-policy-pro-business-not-p…

Luigi Zingales rather aptly described this as pursuing "pro-Business" rather than "pro-Market" policies: https://promarket.org/donald-trumps-economic-policy-pro-business-not-p…

Relevant, and why I am a member of Represent.us https://promarket.org/argue-government-can-buy-government-qa-gary-reba…

Salaries are not exorbitant. We went almost 5 years without a pay raise. How many qualified people - currently working as PTLs or postdocs - would happily take your place for 10% less money? [1] If the answer is 10+ (from what I recall of the academic job market, that seems accurate within STEM, outside of STEM it might be 100+) then you are frivolously spending money. [1] Gerald Epstein elaborates on this argument, though he of course applies it to finance rather than education. https://promarket.org/rents-high-cost-high-finance-qa-gerald-epstein/

"But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway: https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judicial-syste… But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge." I did submit the Order to HN for discusssion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45109044 People read the Opinion, but probably no one read the Order that accompanied it It seems the limited redactions in the Opinion somehow makes up for the trial's lack of transparency Nor was Google ever sanctioned for its past discovery violations The remedies hearing transcripts should be released to the public

You could go back a couple of decades earlier (1960s--1980s) and point at AT&T who specifically prohibited third-party devices on their network (answering machines and even neck-rests or phone-book covers were among the prohibited items),[1] and had flatly rejected packet-switched routing as an obvious threat to their monopoly.[2] Unix itself (and Linux, Android, and MacOS) wouldn't have existed save for a 1954 consent decree which prohibited AT&T from entering the software business.[3] When the company found itself with an accidental operating system the only thing they could do was give it away for free. "From Ken with love".[4] ________________________________ Notes: 1. Partially supported here: <https://www.promarket.org/2023/02/20/when-considering-breaking-up-big-… Phone book covers was AT&T v. Winback & Conserve Program, Inc. Hush-a-Phone was an earlier case in 1956 involving a cup-like device, physical only, with no electrical or electronic components: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_States>. 2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars#Early_computer_networking&… 3. <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-for-feds-f… <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20190086> and <https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/pol.20190086> (PDF) 4. <https://sanctum.geek.nz/presentations/a-brief-history-of-unix.pdf>