[sph]

Companies are not people. We do not need to "remember their contributions and innovations." Their valuation today is because of those contributions, so they got their rewards, profit and then some.

Commission a statue for them if you want. What is this parasocial relationship some people have with fiscal entities?

[yreg]

What parasocial relationship? The parent merely said that we would not be better off if we "got rid of them".

[riddlemethat]

They own stock in them and don't want to see that value erased.

[izacus]

That sad thing is... I don't think most people defending Apple in these topics actually own a significant amount of their stock directly. And they're actually undermining the strength of their own portfolios by undermining the strenght and resilience of USA economy due to erosion of free market competition and market stagnation via monopolies.

[toyg]

There is another type of stock: immaterial social capital. As long as Apple products are status-symbols, owners gain social relevance from their ostentatious use. This is why brands promote themselves way beyond what is necessary to just sell widgets: to build identities that people will invest in, binding themselves into enough social stock that they will feel compelled to campaign for a brand just to protect that investment.

It's all incredibly sad.

[whstl]

Nah, Apple was WAY more of a status-symbol when it wasn't the current penny-pinching entity addicted to "services" and IAP.

There's nothing "high status" in having advertisements in the Settings app.

[toyg]

I don't disagree, Apple's brand was built before the current shenanigans were even possible. "Think different", am I right? I'm just saying that the previous investment in brand-building can now be leveraged into defending the indefensible.

[whstl]

Yep, exactly. IAP and advertisements in settings is the opposite of "Think different".

Apple Music and Apple TV+, sure.

But the 30% from Spotify and Netfix, and other shenanigans... not so much :/

[brookst]

Kind of ironic that social capital on HN is earned by being being pro-regulation, anti-big-tech, isn’t it? Your point holds but there is more than a little irony in the post.

[toyg]

I think it just shows that large tech companies have lost all credibility even among early-adopting, tech-positive nerds.

New technology, unbridled, inevitably reaches a point where its negatives become clear to society at large. The printing press is regulated, cars are regulated, nuclear energy is regulated - because society recognized that we can't just let anyone build reactors in their sheds. Internet tech has probably reached that point.

[fennecbutt]

The difference is motive. Some of us don't give a fuck about our fake Internet points.

Nor do I care about greasing up anybody on here; you're all strangers to me and I'd like to keep it that way.

[brookst]

And also it is extreme disingenuous to dismiss anyone who holds a different opinion with that claim that they must only be doing so for profit motive.

My opinions are well thought out and principled; yours are obviously just the product of greedy self interest.

I can’t stand that kind of rhetoric.

[paulmd]

Yup, again, yet another thread that devolves into android people doing the 'brainless apple sheeple' meme. It's fucking offensive and it's literally any thread that mentions apple. I wish Dang would crack down - this is not good discourse, it's not making HN a better place.

There is the same problem with NVIDIA, all NVIDIA threads eventually devolve into "people too dumb to buy AMD like me" as well, but, with apple there isn't even a slope, it's right into it from the outset.

We have just utterly normalized this sort of conduct from some of these fanboys to the point where it doesn't even register with most people. We just have taken it as the inherent nature of Android fans to be offensive like this.

Perhaps it is their nature. People with poor social skills self-selecting to the nerdy phone, etc. I have been leaning more and more to this theory after seeing it in thread after thread after thread - people simply cannot restrain themselves even here on HN. But oh gosh you can't say those things back! how uncivil! how dare I soil our sacred discourse of "brainless sheeple buying it for the blue bubbles" etc.

But there's no reason for the rest of us to tolerate it. It's shitty discourse. But it's so utterly normalized that everyone just shrugs and looks past it.

[izacus]

What on earth are you going on about? Where on earth are you seeing fanboys and who's prosecuting you?

[smhenderson]

I don't own stock in any of the companies mentioned in the article, although I do own tech stocks.

And I'm not suggesting I have a relationship with any of them, parasocial or otherwise.

I wasn't trying to suggest we treat them like people or put them above us or give them a pass... I simply meant that getting rid of them completely could possibly eliminate the problem being discussed, but would also throw out a lot of value that they created and I didn't think that was the best solution.

[JumpCrisscross]

> What is this parasocial relationship some people have with fiscal entities?

America’s relationship with the tech giants is distinct from Europe’s. We can directly regulate them, if we want to. And our cities are littered with buildings and institutions named after their founders and senior leadership, as well as start-ups seeded by their cash and alumni. We see tremendous side-channel benefits, in other words, from that wealth.

Europe, not as much. Because the founders aren’t there. That is in part due to Europeans’ aversion to big business—if you don’t like big businesses you won’t have them homegrown. (Exception for industrial companies in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands.) But it’s also because American companies have been taking advantage of its until-recent regulatory weakness.

[bratwurst3000]

It seems the only big company in the USA is tech. The rest is in Europe or Asia. The biggest chemical and pharmaceutical industry is in Europe … cars .. planes…. What’s not big industry about Europe beside the stock price of their industry.

[andsoitis]

> It seems the only big company in the USA is tech.

That's not true. If you look at a list of largest US companies (e.g. by revenue) this list is quite diversified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...

Spans retail, petroleum, tech, healthcare, insurance, automotive, telecommunications, financials, food, transportation, media, consumer products, etc.

> The biggest chemical and pharmaceutical industry is in Europe

Top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world:

1) Pfizer (US)

2) Merck (US)

3) AbbVie (US)

4) Janssen (US)

5) Novartis (Switzerland)

6) Roche (Switzerland)

7) Bristol Myers Squibb (US)

8) Sanofi (France)

9) AstraZeneca (UK)

10) GSK (UK)

https://www.drugdiscoverytrends.com/2023-pharma-50-largest-c...

[JumpCrisscross]

Also, largest companies in the world by revenue [1]. American and Chinese with a handful of Swiss, German and Dutch industrial companies. (Plus Vitol, a Swiss commodities group.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by...