Corporate internal markets are well-known as non-free, and when a sufficiently large company is picking and choosing winners in a national economy that's also not a free market.
I think this concept is an exercise in fantasy. There’s simply no such thing as a free market. Why we single out subsidy as non free is arbitrary. What activities constitute legitimate free market behavior? There’s no actual logically sound distinction. The real distinction is “what we do is free market and what our opponents do is not”
> There’s simply no such thing as a free market. Why we single out subsidy as non free is arbitrary. What activities constitute legitimate free market behavior? There’s no actual logically sound distinction.
Sounds like a nirvana fallacy. Yes, nowhere has a perfectly free market, just as nowhere has a perfectly corruptionless justice system and railroad tracks are never perfectly parallel. But there are definitely markets that are less free than others and actions that distort markets further, and it's right to call those out.
I'm not here to debate whether free markets are good or bad, but governments have a privileged position versus private companies, and effectively operate above the law (again at least compared to private companies). Any government intervention takes us away from a free market, either a little bit or a lot, depending on the action. Apple is a private company. Anything it does is really part of the free market, at least in the original meaning of that as described by Adam Smith and co.
We’re talking about China subsidizing goods that it sells in another country. This is bread and butter “free market” behavior. Literally every company in the world does this one way or another.
My friend, what is so special about the government? If a company uses its massive profits in one area to crus competition by selling at a loss in another area, this is the free market, and when a government does it it is something else? I think you have not thought this through
Private companies do things to maximize profits. They might lose money on some stuff to make more on other things, and there might be some gunk in the system but they are almost all laser focused on making bigger profits.
Governments have lots of other incentives (like job creation, elections, income distribution)
Why don't we abolish any business altogether and just have government run everything? There are countries where this is normal, perhaps not "free market" countries like maybe us? :)
A government has a monopoly on violence. A government has a monopoly on money printing and taxation. A government has a monopoly on the legislation. A government has far more human and financial resources than any other economic actor within its borders.
If a company goes out of business, people lose their jobs. If a government goes out of business, people lose their lives.
It is not a difference in degree, it is a difference in kind. There is a reason that economist distinguish between private firms and government.
Well, Apple and Chinese government are one and the same when it comes to spending billions to further their agenda, that’s why that wasn’t a good example.
Yes, they do favor their own companies and provide subsidies etc. that’s not the problem though, the problem is that they’re undercutting other companies by selling below cost thanks to those subsidies. Otherwise, we would have to call our farming subsidies the same.
I was originally trying to point out that it has always been important to keep your vital industries secure, it was very stupid of Intel and others to transfer so much technology abroad (to anyone) just to increase their margins, I think ASML did the best: You can purchase our machine, but that’s pretty much it.
The amount of what-about-ism in this thread is amazing. No, large companies with semi-monopolies using their power to influence government organizations is not part of a free market either.
But OP never claimed that it was.
The whole point is that when in some market there is some nation trying to disturb the free market mechanism in its favor, other countries can't just be naïve and stand by doing nothing. They have to counter act and this is what happend in The Netherlands.
Does anyone know of cool things built with fdb? I’ve been aware of it for a while and it seems very cool but I haven’t seen a lot of details about how folks are using it.
It looks like people are using it to build graph related models on it.
I am looking at it & considering doing something similar for graph data sets. As well as a transactionally safe key value store to store roaring bitmaps.
I am moving my SaaS from RethinkDB to FoundationDB. It's a long-term project that needs to be done very carefully (thousands of people using the app), but the rewards are significant. Thanks to FoundationDB versionstamps, I'll be able to replace changefeeds with polling, simplifying the system, and also make things much faster along the way.
The consistency guarantees are phenomenal and writing software is much easier when you have strict serializability. Most people do not appreciate this because they do not understand the anomalies that you can get without strict serializable consistency.
I'm excited by the idea of pgfdb*. I think it could be a great. postgres, with foundation replacing the transaction system to provide all the benefits that brings, horizontal scalability, automatic sharding, replication, and fault tolerance, and performance. foundationdb is 20+ years ahead of postgres in terms of distributed transaction theory.
Arroyo uses it for their streaming database. Think streaming stateful aggregations. It’s pretty cool tech. Looks like they were recently acquired by cloudflare.
Yes you are. If you’re arguing in good faith then you should try to answer this question:
How far does it have to go before you assume malice? Do they have to tell you “I am malicious”? And if someone malicious is using the “dont admit it” strategy are you fucked?
Individual managers can. The business as a whole is looking at a much bigger picture. But what managers value is throughput, not necessarily unit economics. They'll accept faster delivery at worse unit economics.
This is so sad! It seems Go is fast becoming rudderless, i worry the wualities that have made it great wont survive the tides at google this way. But i hope to be wrong.
