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  • I think people love to hate Steve. The one thing people love more than a great figurehead, is hating one. I think that Steve had a great internal model of how to combine form/function.

    iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, but it may as well have been. It brought the smartphone to the mass market.

    Part of it was a great advertising campaign, which unlike the smartphones at the time, pitched it as a luxury good as opposed to an executive enterprise one. You owned a blackberry to answer emails wherever and whenever you were, you owned an iphone so you can check Google Maps. A large part of it was redefining both the form factor, and use case of a smartphone.

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  • That makes no sense.

    The only difference between a public company and a private company (in this sense) is how liquid the asset is, said another way, how easy it is to enter or exit the position, and how regularly the holdings value is recalculated.

    I could buy 100k of valve stock of someone tomorrow, and then find myself wishing I'd bought NVIDIA. I could buy NVIDIA tomorrow, and it could crash and I could wish I'd bought in to Valve.

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  • But companies don't always chase profit.

    They can also chase growth and the appearance of a company that could or will make money one day. Ex Uber when it first came out and destroyed the taxi industry practically overnight.

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  • Valve might not be a publically traded company, but it sti has shareholders. Some of those shareholders still want Valve to increase value, etc.

    The difference is that valve has a songle large share holder who seems to just not give a fuck about those pressures. While most (all) publically traded companies crumble and fall to that pressure.

  • You need more upvotes.

    High interest rates are here, and it's likely to be some time before we get back down to the 1% interest rates we saw during covid (or even before).

    Companies are shifting either to real or imagined pressures of the stick market. And those pressures are less about chasing unlimited growth and want to see some return.

    Ergo. Layoffs. Meta producing dividends.

    If interest rates stay high, I'd expect to see large megacorps shift more and more to profitability over growth.

  • I'll do my best to explain what I can. But it's hard, and many PHD dissertations will be written on this. It's not exactly something that can just be explained.

    But yes, Covid was probably the most easily identifiable source. In addition, you could make a claim that Putins' moves, the support from Russia to for various "alt-right" groups, and their eventual war in Ukraine (assumedly, aiming for culmination in reuniting the Soviet Union) have an impact. Lastly, we have various AI projects reading "maturity" (or at least public notoriety), and various services realizing they were missing out on a piece of the "AI pie".

    Covid was.... bad. It's a new, deadly disease that potentially leaves people with life altering side effecs (long covid). The Vaccines are good, if not great even for having been developed so quickly and drastically change your likely outcomes, but they aren't full immunity (like we have for Polio). This left governments in a dammed now if you don't support people, or damned later if you do. They all chose various levels of later. Some governments supported businesses directly and left people alone to suffer, others supported people and left businesses mostly alone. Either way: Cash injections into an economy produces inflation.

    Fighting inflation... the most commonly accepted method in the western world is to raise interest rates* and then let it play out. With the loss of cheap money from low interest rates, many businesses are now being pushed by their owners and shareholders from focusing on growth to make profits (eg: Raise prices, crack downs on password sharing, API use).

    There are other claims you could make, and construct narratives with. For a few years now companies have been growing by expanding into growing countries, but now the number of countries left is short, and companies are running out of places to expand into to grow. Once again, as growth becomes impossible or undesirable, the focus shifts to extracting profit from your existing base. We are reaching maximum saturation.

    *Alternatives: If you would like to slash government spending... see Argentina's inflation (it's bad), for windfall taxes see Spain (it's good).

  • This is ridiculous. It is truly ridiculous. How can something that enables the user to efficiently control their AC cause "significant economic harm"???

    I assume they have their own app and run ads/user analytics through it that make them money.

    I have to wonder if you bought their products on the basis that they worked with HA, if you could have some sort of claim here.