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by JumpCrisscross 45 days ago
> Any monopoly with viable economics for profit with no threat of competition yields monopoly profits

"With viable economics" is the point.

My "ludicrous statement" is a back-of-the-envelope test for whether an industry is nonsense. For comparison, consolidating all of the Pets.com competitors in the late 1990s would not have yielded a profitable company.
1 comments
eieiw 45 days ago
Very convenient to leave out Amazon in your back of the envelope test, whose internal metrics were showing a path toward quasi-monopoly profits.

Do you argue in good faith?

There’s a difference between being too early vs being nonsense.

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JumpCrisscross 45 days ago
> Very convenient to leave out Amazon in your back of the envelope test, who’s internal metrics were showing a path toward quasi-monopoly profits

Not in the 1990s. The American e-commerce industry was structurally unprofitable prior to the dot-com crash, an event Amazon (and eBay) responded to by fundamentally changing their businesses. Amazon bet on fulfillment. eBay bet on payments. Both represented a vertical integration that illustrates the point–the original model didn't work.

> There’s a difference between being too early vs being nonsense

When answering the question "do the investments make sense," not really. You're losing your money either way.

The American AI industry appears to have "viable economics for profit" without AGI. That doesn't guarantee anyone will earn them. But it's not a meaningless conclusion. (Though I'd personally frame it as a hypothesis I'm leaning towards.)

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SkyEyedGreyWyrm 45 days ago
Malcolm Harris' Palo Alto explained the failures of many dotcom startups and Amazon's later success in the field (in part) to the fact that dotcom era delivery was done by highly trained, highly compensated, unionized in-company workers, meanwhile Amazon prevents unions, contracts (or contracted, I'm not up to date on this) companies for delivery and has exploitative working conditions with high turnover, the economics are very different and are a big contributor to their success
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