I’m breaking one of my biggest rules..

[Tonutz]

the apple touch bar on macs was not garbage.  hear me out, I'm not a power user.  I'm a web browser warrior and outlook with teams for work its the most basic of use cases.  I don't use function keys, having the touch bar used to give me the option to end a call on teams easily or scroll emoji in chat things like that.  it was something that added extra function to a very basic workflow.  now I get that its not for the pros or all use cases but I think they should've kept it for the people like me. 

 

name is pronounced (Ton-utz) not (to nuts) 

[terroralpha]

8 hours ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

Nope. I got an RX 480, and now I have a 5700XT, bought with my own money.

Again. This was not aimed at you the average user with your budget GPU or potato APU. The Twitter post in the time stamp and my reply specifically spoke about influencers who have 4090s and 7900xtxs just sitting on Shelves. They all say support the little guy but then won’t actually buy or use amd GPUs. 
 

do people here not know how to read ?

[RingaDingDingDong]

22 hours ago, Asbo Zapruder said:

Linus seems incapable of grasping the simple fact of why his stance on unions is offensive, and it's that IT'S NOT ABOUT HIM.

 

 

yea, i have to agree on this one. Linus' views on this are too egocentric. 

It's easily understandable that at his current company size, he personally will have no negative nor positive impact on many of his employees just due to the fact, that there are 1,2 or even 3 levels of management inbetween him and the most simple jobs at his company. 

As companies are highly dependable on their employees, said employees also should have a bundled strength to work as a counterweight. It has been like this in europe for over 150 years, and the american fear of unions is straight-out laughable. 

[Dutch_Master]

19 minutes ago, RingaDingDingDong said:

the american fear of unions is straight-out laughable.

Except it isn't. Japan lost WW II as they severely underestimated the power of American industrial manufacturing. Then-USSR leader Stalin got the message. He had his communists infiltrate US Unions to disrupt or even stop outright US manufacturing capabilities in case of a war. It radicalised US Unions, not helped by American anti-Russian politics of the day. Unfortunately, after the demise of the USSR, things didn't improve and relations between Unions and employers remain strained at best, openly hostile in other times. Both sides are to blame, make no mistake about it. US employers (including Canadians) are, if they can, determined to keep Unions out of their business, notable cases include Amazon, Starbucks and several other high profile companies who since have been "rectified" by the Courts over employee rights to Unionise.

 

FYI: I'm European, Union member and not exactly a fan of the undiluted greed of American corporate business practices. But also a realist who sees labour relations in the US (and Canada!) need urgent updating. It'll be a fair while more sunsets before that's happening though

[Quackers101]

disagree with the RTX statement.

Handcrafted non-RTX can look better, more "realistic" to some content.

How Nvidia forced it a bit, did not help the lighting and made some game sections unplayable.

 

then again there will be added more exposure options and other options for this type of light, like with the light probes that helps a scene and can adjust the amount + bounces. For some titles with RTX in mind, it can help a lot

 

Also some type of blurr can help, do wonder how that works with eye tracking + game, it really depends on how its handled and for the gameplay, more so with racing.

 

For nvidia features, that both a hit and miss. As there is a lot of features they gatekeep or lock, with GPUs that could use those features no longer can, or has less access. Do wonder if they will do a major one if they go out of the RTX lineup or make paid subscriptions for them. at least nvidia omniverse might have some free but need account to use.

[Razercake]

1 hour ago, RingaDingDingDong said:

yea, i have to agree on this one. Linus' views on this are too egocentric. 

I know my dad has been very annoyed with his union multiple times, it ain't all sunshine but like Linus said in the video "he would feel it is a failure on his side" & maybe more importantly he legally can't do anything if they wanted to unionize. so sure let them unionize, but that is up to them. I really don't see anything wrong what what he said, unless he is actively stopping them from unionizing there isn't a problem in my opinion.

[nekollx]

16 hours ago, poochyena said:

That doesn't mean they have a monopoly. Android is their competitor, and any app on ios can be ported to android. Developers have the choice to develop for iphone and android. The term I think you all are looking for is "walled garden", not monopoly. They aren't the only company selling apps for smartphone devices. Its not a monopoly just because they are the only ones selling apps on their own device.

no its a monopoly.
Lets use your own example android.
Who can develop apps for android and what options do you have to install apps to your android?

now same qustion but apple
Who can develop apps for iphone and what options do you have to install apps to your iphone?
 

[nekollx]

2 hours ago, RingaDingDingDong said:

yea, i have to agree on this one. Linus' views on this are too egocentric. 

It's easily understandable that at his current company size, he personally will have no negative nor positive impact on many of his employees just due to the fact, that there are 1,2 or even 3 levels of management inbetween him and the most simple jobs at his company. 

As companies are highly dependable on their employees, said employees also should have a bundled strength to work as a counterweight. It has been like this in europe for over 150 years, and the american fear of unions is straight-out laughable. 

except even in this videy itself he says he neither can nor wold stop his staff from forminga union. But that he see they doing so a failure on him as a bussiness owner. That what your all ignoring. Linus isn't anti union, and outright says she would not stop his people forming one. His point is that if his staff had to form a union to get fair tretment and wages he would see that as a sign of him failing as CEO.

 

its a valid stance. If the staff can talk to the ceo and work out resonable terms why need a union, the point of the union is to advocate for the employees. If you are encouraged to advocate for yourself you dont need a union. And Linus belives that if fyou reach that stages you fail as a CEO 

[poochyena]

3 hours ago, nekollx said:

no its a monopoly.
Lets use your own example android.
Who can develop apps for android and what options do you have to install apps to your android?

now same qustion but apple
Who can develop apps for iphone and what options do you have to install apps to your iphone?

Its their own software though, so the term monopoly makes no sense. Its like saying Linus has a monopoly on LTT forums or a monopoly on LTTstore.com. No one would use the term monopoly like that. A monopoly isn't when a company controls what is available on its own devices.

[TheDragonLord]

"Amazon is not a monopoly.", Linus Sebastian.

 

Linus, I'm going to post some resources because I recognize that both as a Canadian, Amazon's monopolistic powers may be felt less for you. Additionally, given you high rate of involvement along with other staff in accessing "alternative options", you my not be as familiar with the factors surrounding Amazon and what constitutes Monopoly powers—Oligopoly/Monopolu because, let's face it, not everyone geeked out in Microeconomics and then deep dived so long and hard that they came out the other side.

 

Remember my previous comments about "economic rent" regarding Adobe and other firms that are seeking to profit without producing anything? If not, I don't blame you—you probably read a lot of comments. That said, economic rent and economic control over markets (we can refer to it as monopoly powers for simplicity) are factors in understanding what constitutes Monopoly.

 

A firm can be a monopoly without necessarily having 100% control over a market. Yes, some firms, such as De Beers, the UK/Dutch, South African Diamond Mining firm have, historically been textbook examples (or exemplars) or Classical Monopoly where a firm has effectively total control over a market. Likewise, other firms such as the historic Big Three Cereal manufacturers (Kellogg, General Mills, and Post) are used in Microeconomics textbooks (and have for decades) as examples of Oligopolies, or markets controlled by effectively a limited handful of firms (basically, most markets today due to Private-Public collusion, and the hijacking of classical economics, political economy, and antitrust legal theory by rentiers and monopolists starting most prominently in the 1970s) who can exert economic power and price power when they collude (most recently, like the meat packing industry, or something you might be far more familiar with in the tech sphere—the "price fixing" class action lawsuits against memory manufacturers for economic collusion—where a small cabal of firms collude to fix the price of particular commodities at the expense of the society or globe—something we, collectively, deam harmful harmful and usurious, or rather, seeking to extract a form of economic rent from the general public through their power to control the price of goods throughout the marketplace).

 

Microsoft, for all intents and purposes, remained an effective monopoly in the operating system market, as did Intel in terms of General Central Processing Unit sales. AMD was like the sweet little kid they kept around to keep the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) from ruling them a monopoly (well, assuming the FTC did it's job under the laws as written and under the law/economic theory as classically understood). For over a decade, Intel could have crushed AMD with their pricing power and monopolistic control over the CPU marketplaces. By the early 2000s, this was especially true. Intel, had they not been limited by anticompetitive practices had the manufacturing and market capacity to pull a John D. Rockefeller, Sr.—either sell your firm to us or we'll crush you in business. There's a scene from the HBO series, The Guilded Age, that does a remarkable job expressing this sort of situation where one of the characters, the head of a large trust, threatens to build a railroad line directly next to a preexisting one just to ruin the other railroad. Not because it was an "efficient use of capital", but because by crushing his competition, he'd set an example, demonstrating that if someone tries to compete with him/his firm, fails to sell or obey, he would destroy them, all so that he could gain monopoly powers and thus be able to enact economic rent upon the masses, or more specifically, the market, artificially raising the price curve and forcing people to pay his demanded rates because he was the only game in town/only option.

 

This last bit is where I want to draw our attention—you mentioned that people have "other options", but in many cases, at least, in the US, this is not true. Oh, it may not be universally true, but because of ease, convenience, dominance, availability, and other factors (including Amazon's own actions on their very platform), Amazon throughout much of the E-Commerce marketplace is, effectively, a monopoly. And Amazon has acted with intention to make sure their market share in general E-Commerce continues to solidify.

 

Now, you used Apple, Inc.'s platform as a model for "a monopoly", and yes—given how Apple chooses to control (effectively, lock the frack down) its mobile devices (particularly, its mobile phone infrastructure), the Apple Apps Store acts effectively as a "Classical Monopoly" (similar to our previous example, De Beers). Google, Inc., on the other hand, because the Android OS, in theory/in principle, enables its customers to use alternative marketplaces or to directly install custom applications via Sideloading or custom app installs (those lovely little .APK files), one could argue that Google's Play Store, unlike Apple's Apps Store, is not a monopoly.

 

However, the world is not as simple as all that and there are more than one type of Monopoly. Google, while not necessarily a "monopoly" in the classical sense, is, however, an effective monopoly (as in, it is effectively a monopoly by way of the means by which is exerts power over market forces, limits access to competition, is synonymous with e-commerce [at least, in the US], and through the shear quantity of the relative E-Commerce marketplace that Amazon, Inc. controls). By sophisticated means, it, like numerous other firms in other markets, have found ways to hedge in consumers such that, in particular on their own platform, but also throughout the markets in general, Amazon has set itself up as effectively, the only game in town.

 

Did you know that the vast majority of people who search for products don't even bother with regular web searches, but go straight to Amazon?¹

 

This "straight to Amazon", and in particular, PRIME's free, 2-Day shipping, is what helped turn Amazon effectively into a monopoly (it is also why the United States Postal Service started hiring people outside of their traditional methods, and doing so in such a way that was highly exploitative in order to subsidize Amazon's shipping fees). Initially, Amazon contained themselves to books, where they effectively became a monopoly², exerting massive economic power over the global book marketplaces and forcing most independent booksellers, particularly, used booksellers, to use their platform or risk going out of business because of a lack of traffic as people moved from brick-and-morter store purchasing to online sales because of the far lower costs associated with online direct sales (if you only have to pay for the upkeep of a website and warehouse, with enough volume and purchasing power, a firm could quite readily undercut their competition [much like what I previously have said about Intel being able to dump a ton of chips onto the marketplace, historically, at a moments notice, much like De Beers could with diamonds, and through the flood of commodities, crash the commodity's market price, thereby putting their competition out of business³]).

 

It's for these reasons (amongst numerous other related and unrelated factors), as well as Amazon management's/Bezos' continuous efforts to build a monopoly (vertical or otherwise) that it is reasonable to define Amazon as a monopoly.

 

Furthermore, and I know I'm getting way into the weeds here, the whole dialogue around "What constitutes a monopoly?", "What constitutes anticompetitive practices?", and "What should governments, in particular, the US Government, deem as 'dangerous' anticompetitive practices that should justify the breaking up and limiting of firms from acquisition of their competitive or their expansion into other markets?" (For this later issue of expanding into other markets, specifically, horizontal monopoly, where a firm has control over a vast swath of an economy; they might not hold vertical dominance, but they may, like Amazon, effectively control vast swaths of a particular economy or market whereby they are capable of exerting effective control over the marketplace, taking pricing power away from consumers, distorting market equalibrium on the supply demand curve, and ultimately threatening the integrity of the societies in which they may participate.) is relevant here because of a vast and intentional shift in antitrust legal theory that occured during the latter half of the 20th century.

 

You may (or may not) be family with a candidate for the Supreme Court that the Reagan administration put forward for the US Supreme Court, Robert Bork. But, in regards to the undermining of antitrust laws and the hijacking of consumer pricing power, we can thank (or hate) Bork for his "contributions" to the mass consolidation and finance capitalist dystopian hellscape that is (arguably) our present reality.

 

In fact, I highly recommend you (and your staff writers/researchers) check out an article written by the US's current FTC chair, Lina Khan, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox"⁴ for calling attention to the destructive powers Bork's theories cause the global world (and in particular, the US markets).

 

I'm going to throw in some other articles, but I highly recommend you check out the videos by the US Organization, More Perfect Union, and their YouTube channel for videos concerning this and other related issues.⁵

 

I recognize this is effectively a research paper on "Why Linus Sebastian Is Wrong—Amazon Is A Monopoly." that I just spent the last two and a half hours writing on my phone, but damnit! This stuff is important! And, as technology journalists, even if Canadian ones, this economics and legal theory stuff is super relevant to regular people and I suspect the LTT viewership, even if they wouldn't necessarily take the time to read all of this. And, no, I have no idea if anyone will take the time to read it from LTT. All I can do is post this to y'all's website in the hopes that the information has some potential impact. Even if it doesn't necessarily impact Linus' opinions, it might (and that's a BIG might) go so far as to provide some additional context that folks might not necessarily be familiar with who don't frequent the sort of deep dive ADHD political economy holes that I do.

 

Well, in any event. Assuming this actually posts and doesn't get deleted because I WROTE A FRIGGING ESSAY/REPORT on WHY LINUS SEBASTIAN IS WRONG and thereby exceed some predetermined character limit. Hopefully, this analysis helps or proves useful to your future journalism exploits!

 

 

Cheers folks!

 

TheDragonLord

 

 

PS. Feel free to reference anything if it does prove useful. You can email me for questions at christopher.vanderwallbrown@gmail.com

 

References:

 

1. I'll need to lookup the studies if you want references. I heard this statistic as part of a group representing Midwestern Farmers, seeking to break up Amazon and make its marketplace a government regulated "utility" or "public infrastructure" whereby, it, like say Canada's Power Utilities, are strictly regulated and held accountable by special boards to limit the power they hold over the marketplace because of how important their services are. It's just that in Canada's case (to my understanding), instead of say regulating private firms to run their own, private, nuclear fission reactors, Canada chose to have these as publicly owned utilities, which is why y'all have order of magnitude safer reactors than the US. [Just a little ADHD side tangent for the scientifically inclined.]         

 

2. https://www.bookweb.org/sites/default/files/diy/American Booksellers Association 2020 Amazon White Paper_0.pdf

 

3. The reason Intel could have done this is because of their economies of scale. They could produce far larger quantities of CPUs than AMD historically, even when AMD was still in control of and doing its own fabrication (before the spinoff of the fab side of the business by let's say the "finance capitalists" into Global Foundries). By holding all that market power, Intel could have flooded the market with redonculously cheap CPUs that, even if AMD's were technically superior (at least, as for a time that I'm sure you remember at the turn of the 21st century, they were), Intel's pricing power could have bankrupted AMD because enough consumers (unless some outside variables like people seeing what Intel was doing and boycotted them by only buying AMD—something that I supported at the time precisely because Intel was a monopoly) would have chosen the vastly lower price over the somewhat more technically superior product. Intel also had more cash on hand to pull off this anticompetitive practice.

 

You may recall the commodity's market for oil crashing during the last decade when oil prices tanked because OPEC (specifically, Saudi Arabia) attempted to put (the largely Canadian) shake oil firms out of business by not reducing production, thereby crashing the per barrel price for crude. This in turn caused the price of gasoline at the pump to divebomb into prices not seen in many consumer's lifetime. I heard that prices dropped at one point below 50¢ per barrel, and due to contract preordering of crude and gasoline, firms couldn't even give away their crude and were having to pay people to take it off their hands because they were trapped in contracted purchase orders of a predetermined number of units per month and would face far more expense breeching their contracts than they would paying people to take the crude off their hands.

 

While this aforementioned situation didn't last forever (nor were the House of Saud able to accomplish their stated objective of crushing the North American shale oil business), it does make for an excellent case study in monopoly powers, commodity price fixing, and the attempts by firms in capitalism to seek monopoly powers. (Ironically, the term "capitalism" itself actually refers historically to people [monopolists] who seek to use capital to obtain monopolist powers and control markets whereby thlse powers enable them to enact economic rents upon those markets. And we all know how much harm economic rent causes.)

 

4. Lina M. Khan, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, 126 Yale L. J. 710 (2017). https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf 

 

https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2808

 

5. "Exposed: The Real Reason Behind Skyrocketing Egg Prices." More Perfect Union.

 

"Why flying keeps getting worse." More Perfect Union.

 

"'I Almost Ended My Life Because Of The Corrupt & Rigged Beef Industry' | The Class Room". More Perfect Union.

 

https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1507&context=faculty

 

https://cfds.fisipol.ugm.ac.id/wp-content/uploads/sites/1423/2021/01/45-CfDS-Case-Study-Is-Amazon-a-Monopoly.pdf

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/06/amazon-bullies-partners-and-vendors-says-antitrust-subcommittee.html

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-accused-of-using-monopoly-power-in-rise-as-e-commerce-gatekeeper-11602084168

 

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/amazon-is-already-valued-like-monopoly-2022-09-19/

 

 

 

e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf

e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf Collusion to Control a Powerful Customer_ Amazon E-Books and An.pdf 45-CfDS-Case-Study-Is-Amazon-a-Monopoly.pdf

[TheDragonLord]

2 minutes ago, TheDragonLord said:

"Amazon is not a monopoly.", Linus Sebastian.

 

Linus, I'm going to post some resources because I recognize that both as a Canadian, Amazon's monopolistic powers may be felt less for you. Additionally, given you high rate of involvement along with other staff in accessing "alternative options", you my not be as familiar with the factors surrounding Amazon and what constitutes Monopoly powers—Oligopoly/Monopolu because, let's face it, not everyone geeked out in Microeconomics and then deep dived so long and hard that they came out the other side.

 

Remember my previous comments about "economic rent" regarding Adobe and other firms that are seeking to profit without producing anything? If not, I don't blame you—you probably read a lot of comments. That said, economic rent and economic control over markets (we can refer to it as monopoly powers for simplicity) are factors in understanding what constitutes Monopoly.

 

A firm can be a monopoly without necessarily having 100% control over a market. Yes, some firms, such as De Beers, the UK/Dutch, South African Diamond Mining firm have, historically been textbook examples (or exemplars) or Classical Monopoly where a firm has effectively total control over a market. Likewise, other firms such as the historic Big Three Cereal manufacturers (Kellogg, General Mills, and Post) are used in Microeconomics textbooks (and have for decades) as examples of Oligopolies, or markets controlled by effectively a limited handful of firms (basically, most markets today due to Private-Public collusion, and the hijacking of classical economics, political economy, and antitrust legal theory by rentiers and monopolists starting most prominently in the 1970s) who can exert economic power and price power when they collude (most recently, like the meat packing industry, or something you might be far more familiar with in the tech sphere—the "price fixing" class action lawsuits against memory manufacturers for economic collusion—where a small cabal of firms collude to fix the price of particular commodities at the expense of the society or globe—something we, collectively, deam harmful harmful and usurious, or rather, seeking to extract a form of economic rent from the general public through their power to control the price of goods throughout the marketplace).

 

Microsoft, for all intents and purposes, remained an effective monopoly in the operating system market, as did Intel in terms of General Central Processing Unit sales. AMD was like the sweet little kid they kept around to keep the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) from ruling them a monopoly (well, assuming the FTC did it's job under the laws as written and under the law/economic theory as classically understood). For over a decade, Intel could have crushed AMD with their pricing power and monopolistic control over the CPU marketplaces. By the early 2000s, this was especially true. Intel, had they not been limited by anticompetitive practices had the manufacturing and market capacity to pull a John D. Rockefeller, Sr.—either sell your firm to us or we'll crush you in business. There's a scene from the HBO series, The Guilded Age, that does a remarkable job expressing this sort of situation where one of the characters, the head of a large trust, threatens to build a railroad line directly next to a preexisting one just to ruin the other railroad. Not because it was an "efficient use of capital", but because by crushing his competition, he'd set an example, demonstrating that if someone tries to compete with him/his firm, fails to sell or obey, he would destroy them, all so that he could gain monopoly powers and thus be able to enact economic rent upon the masses, or more specifically, the market, artificially raising the price curve and forcing people to pay his demanded rates because he was the only game in town/only option.

 

This last bit is where I want to draw our attention—you mentioned that people have "other options", but in many cases, at least, in the US, this is not true. Oh, it may not be universally true, but because of ease, convenience, dominance, availability, and other factors (including Amazon's own actions on their very platform), Amazon throughout much of the E-Commerce marketplace is, effectively, a monopoly. And Amazon has acted with intention to make sure their market share in general E-Commerce continues to solidify.

 

Now, you used Apple, Inc.'s platform as a model for "a monopoly", and yes—given how Apple chooses to control (effectively, lock the frack down) its mobile devices (particularly, its mobile phone infrastructure), the Apple Apps Store acts effectively as a "Classical Monopoly" (similar to our previous example, De Beers). Google, Inc., on the other hand, because the Android OS, in theory/in principle, enables its customers to use alternative marketplaces or to directly install custom applications via Sideloading or custom app installs (those lovely little .APK files), one could argue that Google's Play Store, unlike Apple's Apps Store, is not a monopoly.

 

However, the world is not as simple as all that and there are more than one type of Monopoly. Google, while not necessarily a "monopoly" in the classical sense, is, however, an effective monopoly (as in, it is effectively a monopoly by way of the means by which is exerts power over market forces, limits access to competition, is synonymous with e-commerce [at least, in the US], and through the shear quantity of the relative E-Commerce marketplace that Amazon, Inc. controls). By sophisticated means, it, like numerous other firms in other markets, have found ways to hedge in consumers such that, in particular on their own platform, but also throughout the markets in general, Amazon has set itself up as effectively, the only game in town.

 

Did you know that the vast majority of people who search for products don't even bother with regular web searches, but go straight to Amazon?¹

 

This "straight to Amazon", and in particular, PRIME's free, 2-Day shipping, is what helped turn Amazon effectively into a monopoly (it is also why the United States Postal Service started hiring people outside of their traditional methods, and doing so in such a way that was highly exploitative in order to subsidize Amazon's shipping fees). Initially, Amazon contained themselves to books, where they effectively became a monopoly², exerting massive economic power over the global book marketplaces and forcing most independent booksellers, particularly, used booksellers, to use their platform or risk going out of business because of a lack of traffic as people moved from brick-and-morter store purchasing to online sales because of the far lower costs associated with online direct sales (if you only have to pay for the upkeep of a website and warehouse, with enough volume and purchasing power, a firm could quite readily undercut their competition [much like what I previously have said about Intel being able to dump a ton of chips onto the marketplace, historically, at a moments notice, much like De Beers could with diamonds, and through the flood of commodities, crash the commodity's market price, thereby putting their competition out of business³]).

 

It's for these reasons (amongst numerous other related and unrelated factors), as well as Amazon management's/Bezos' continuous efforts to build a monopoly (vertical or otherwise) that it is reasonable to define Amazon as a monopoly.

 

Furthermore, and I know I'm getting way into the weeds here, the whole dialogue around "What constitutes a monopoly?", "What constitutes anticompetitive practices?", and "What should governments, in particular, the US Government, deem as 'dangerous' anticompetitive practices that should justify the breaking up and limiting of firms from acquisition of their competitive or their expansion into other markets?" (For this later issue of expanding into other markets, specifically, horizontal monopoly, where a firm has control over a vast swath of an economy; they might not hold vertical dominance, but they may, like Amazon, effectively control vast swaths of a particular economy or market whereby they are capable of exerting effective control over the marketplace, taking pricing power away from consumers, distorting market equalibrium on the supply demand curve, and ultimately threatening the integrity of the societies in which they may participate.) is relevant here because of a vast and intentional shift in antitrust legal theory that occured during the latter half of the 20th century.

 

You may (or may not) be family with a candidate for the Supreme Court that the Reagan administration put forward for the US Supreme Court, Robert Bork. But, in regards to the undermining of antitrust laws and the hijacking of consumer pricing power, we can thank (or hate) Bork for his "contributions" to the mass consolidation and finance capitalist dystopian hellscape that is (arguably) our present reality.

 

In fact, I highly recommend you (and your staff writers/researchers) check out an article written by the US's current FTC chair, Lina Khan, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox"⁴ for calling attention to the destructive powers Bork's theories cause the global world (and in particular, the US markets).

 

I'm going to throw in some other articles, but I highly recommend you check out the videos by the US Organization, More Perfect Union, and their YouTube channel for videos concerning this and other related issues.⁵

 

I recognize this is effectively a research paper on "Why Linus Sebastian Is Wrong—Amazon Is A Monopoly." that I just spent the last two and a half hours writing on my phone, but damnit! This stuff is important! ">">">"> And, as technology journalists, even if Canadian ones, this economics and legal theory stuff is super relevant to regular people and I suspect the LTT viewership, even if they wouldn't necessarily take the time to read all of this. "> And, no, I have no idea if anyone will take the time to read it from LTT. All I can do is post this to y'all's website in the hopes that the information has some potential impact. Even if it doesn't necessarily impact Linus' opinions, it might (and that's a BIG might) go so far as to provide some additional context that folks might not necessarily be familiar with who don't frequent the sort of deep dive ADHD political economy holes that I do.

 

Well, in any event. Assuming this actually posts and doesn't get deleted because I WROTE A FRIGGING ESSAY/REPORT on WHY LINUS SEBASTIAN IS WRONG ">">"> and thereby exceed some predetermined character limit. Hopefully, this analysis helps or proves useful to your future journalism exploits!

 

 

Cheers folks! ">">

 

TheDragonLord

 

 

PS. Feel free to reference anything if it does prove useful. You can email me for questions at christopher.vanderwallbrown@gmail.com

 

References:

 

1. I'll need to lookup the studies if you want references. I heard this statistic as part of a group representing Midwestern Farmers, seeking to break up Amazon and make its marketplace a government regulated "utility" or "public infrastructure" whereby, it, like say Canada's Power Utilities, are strictly regulated and held accountable by special boards to limit the power they hold over the marketplace because of how important their services are. It's just that in Canada's case (to my understanding), instead of say regulating private firms to run their own, private, nuclear fission reactors, Canada chose to have these as publicly owned utilities, which is why y'all have order of magnitude safer reactors than the US. [Just a little ADHD side tangent for the scientifically inclined.]         

 

2. https://www.bookweb.org/sites/default/files/diy/American Booksellers Association 2020 Amazon White Paper_0.pdf

 

3. The reason Intel could have done this is because of their economies of scale. They could produce far larger quantities of CPUs than AMD historically, even when AMD was still in control of and doing its own fabrication (before the spinoff of the fab side of the business by let's say the "finance capitalists" into Global Foundries). By holding all that market power, Intel could have flooded the market with redonculously cheap CPUs that, even if AMD's were technically superior (at least, as for a time that I'm sure you remember at the turn of the 21st century, they were), Intel's pricing power could have bankrupted AMD because enough consumers (unless some outside variables like people seeing what Intel was doing and boycotted them by only buying AMD—something that I supported at the time precisely because Intel was a monopoly) would have chosen the vastly lower price over the somewhat more technically superior product. Intel also had more cash on hand to pull off this anticompetitive practice.

 

You may recall the commodity's market for oil crashing during the last decade when oil prices tanked because OPEC (specifically, Saudi Arabia) attempted to put (the largely Canadian) shake oil firms out of business by not reducing production, thereby crashing the per barrel price for crude. This in turn caused the price of gasoline at the pump to divebomb into prices not seen in many consumer's lifetime. I heard that prices dropped at one point below 50¢ per barrel, and due to contract preordering of crude and gasoline, firms couldn't even give away their crude and were having to pay people to take it off their hands because they were trapped in contracted purchase orders of a predetermined number of units per month and would face far more expense breeching their contracts than they would paying people to take the crude off their hands.

 

While this aforementioned situation didn't last forever (nor were the House of Saud able to accomplish their stated objective of crushing the North American shale oil business), it does make for an excellent case study in monopoly powers, commodity price fixing, and the attempts by firms in capitalism to seek monopoly powers. (Ironically, the term "capitalism" itself actually refers historically to people [monopolists] who seek to use capital to obtain monopolist powers and control markets whereby thlse powers enable them to enact economic rents upon those markets. And we all know how much harm economic rent causes.)

 

4. Lina M. Khan, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, 126 Yale L. J. 710 (2017). https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf 

 

https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2808

 

5. "Exposed: The Real Reason Behind Skyrocketing Egg Prices." More Perfect Union.

 

"Why flying keeps getting worse." More Perfect Union.

 

"'I Almost Ended My Life Because Of The Corrupt & Rigged Beef Industry' | The Class Room". More Perfect Union.

 

https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1507&context=faculty

 

https://cfds.fisipol.ugm.ac.id/wp-content/uploads/sites/1423/2021/01/45-CfDS-Case-Study-Is-Amazon-a-Monopoly.pdf

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/06/amazon-bullies-partners-and-vendors-says-antitrust-subcommittee.html

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-accused-of-using-monopoly-power-in-rise-as-e-commerce-gatekeeper-11602084168

 

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/amazon-is-already-valued-like-monopoly-2022-09-19/

 

 

 

 

e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf 761.33 kB · 0 downloads Collusion to Control a Powerful Customer_ Amazon E-Books and An.pdf 4.08 MB · 0 downloads 45-CfDS-Case-Study-Is-Amazon-a-Monopoly.pdf 8.05 MB · 0 downloads 

No clue what happened with the text editor. I think I may have broken something because I wrote so much. Oh well…

 

In any event, the strikeouts shouldn't be there, but J couldn't find a way to fix them, so "screw it". I just spent 2h & 45m writing and editing, and I got shit to do, so y'all enjoy yourselves!

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

On 3/27/2023 at 10:23 PM, SkyHound0202 said:

Intel's foundries are their liability.

It's the opposite. USA and EU governments have opened their wallet to subsidize silicon manufacturing and achieve resilience.

 

Sure, Intel foundries are lagging behind TSMC, but not by an insurmountable margin, and Intel is more resilient to shortages. Guess which CPUs were more available during the pandemic? Intel, not AMD. Because Intel has an enormous 14nm fab capacity. AMD wasn't able to fully leverage it's superior CPUs to get market share because the outsourced manufacturing couldn't keep up.

AMD had fabs, but had to gave up on fabs (GlobalFoundries) because it didn't have the capital. Intel has more than enough capital to do it all, even enough spare capital to enter the GPU market as a third competitor.

[Quackers101]

also intel with many new fabs with new equipment, hope some experimental.

[poochyena]

Why is linus against monitor light bars? They don't give off bad light reflections like a normal lamp does. They are amazing

 

On 3/28/2023 at 7:40 PM, TheDragonLord said:

This last bit is where I want to draw our attention—you mentioned that people have "other options", but in many cases, at least, in the US, this is not true. Oh, it may not be universally true, but because of ease, convenience, dominance, availability, and other factors (including Amazon's own actions on their very platform), Amazon throughout much of the E-Commerce marketplace is, effectively, a monopoly. And Amazon has acted with intention to make sure their market share in general E-Commerce continues to solidify.

Can you tell me what I can buy on amazon but can't buy elsewhere on the internet or irl? Fairly certain amazon has a monopoly on exactly 0 product categories.

[DarkSwordsman]

I disagree with the motion blur argument from Linus.

I wouldn't enable it in an FPS game where I'm trying to actually win or take it seriously. However, there are many games I play where having a slight motion blur at 120 FPS or higher makes it feel magnitudes smoother, especially on a display that does not suffer from ghosting as much.

Edit: Also, 23:36 about Ryzen: My 3950X still performs worse than benchmarks and has had a plethora of issues that I simply have never seen on Intel-based systems. Nevermind the 7950X3D video they just released.

[Retro_R]

Quote

It doesn't exactly feel like they're trying to innovate over there [talking about lightning connector]

Isn't that kinda the point tho? Don't y'all remember when apple ditched the 30-pin to the lightning and a lot of ppl were up in arms about how now most things weren't compatable w docks or other accessories and apple was changing ports and all that? So wouldn't it be better to stick with one cable for the phone so not all of the numerous accessories that have been made around the lightning connector won't turn into e-waste? Like i understand the want for one single connector/wire across all of your devices but like, please think about things for more than 30 seconds. Do i think apple should ditch the lightning connector all together? I mean, i guess, it's kinda complicated but ig it would be something different. All im tryna say is theres 2 sides to the argument

 

Plus, like linus said later in the video, it's not like the phones need some type of usb 4.0 5000TB/s connector or whatever, so it shouldn't really matter what speed the data is going at. To be honest, i dont even remember the last time i plugged my phone into my computer for any file connection type thing.