Hacker News: dd36

New comment by dd36 in "Private equity bought America's essential services"

dd36 — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:47:51 +0000

End consolidation. Go back to pre-1980s antitrust policy. Encourage competition and bust the trusts.

New comment by dd36 in "The Bromine Chokepoint"

dd36 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 04:19:50 +0000

That sounds toxic.

New comment by dd36 in "Landlords are using automated services to monitor tenant promotions"

dd36 — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 07:58:10 +0000

Single family used to act as a check on greed. Careless institutional investment was limited to multi family. They couldn’t push multi family rents beyond single family. Once institutional got into single family, everything became uncapped. It’s harder for millions of small landlords competing for tenants to act as a cartel than it is for a few large landlords taking up marginal supply.

New comment by dd36 in "BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal"

dd36 — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:19:18 +0000

It’s stock manipulation.

New comment by dd36 in "Seoul says US must fix its visa system if it wants Korea's investments"

dd36 — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 03:02:21 +0000

It’s good for the fossil fuel industry and that’s why it was done.

New comment by dd36 in "Tokens are getting more expensive"

dd36 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 14:27:54 +0000

Cats doing tricks has a limited budget.

New comment by dd36 in "Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)"

dd36 — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 07:49:23 +0000

Musicians used to not let their songs be used in commercials.

New comment by dd36 in "Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US"

dd36 — Fri, 02 May 2025 14:42:59 +0000

*Perfect

New comment by dd36 in "Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney"

dd36 — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 04:33:32 +0000

Or they’re aiding it.

New comment by dd36 in "Fetch-MCP: Playwright-Based MCP Server with Batch URL Fetching Support"

dd36 — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 03:57:55 +0000

Can’t you just have it login?

New comment by dd36 in "Why We're Falling Out of Love with Tesla"

dd36 — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 03:06:50 +0000

And, historically, CEOs only were the CEO of one company and had one job.

New comment by dd36 in "It's not a crime if we do it with an app"

dd36 — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 03:44:23 +0000

Google was literally declared a monopoly by a court recently. Facebook and Apple both are oligopolies or monopolies in certain market segments. Apple has a monopoly on app store and on device payments. These things are bad enough that they’re being litigated.

New comment by dd36 in "It's not a crime if we do it with an app"

dd36 — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 03:41:17 +0000

But those extra dollars aren’t with consumers. Otherwise, yes. That’s where the money supply causes inflation argument falls apart — at least for this case.

New comment by dd36 in "It's not a crime if we do it with an app"

dd36 — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 03:38:42 +0000

More like the shenanigans aren’t new and can move up and down. And there’s coordination between the segments in the chain. How is it that farmers are making less than ever before but the products are more expensive than ever before? Look at spot prices for food commodities like corn going back a decade or two. The price is flat. Why are prices of goods up? Why are companies now less efficient instead of more efficient? There are plenty of ways that middle men bloat costs. Profit margins are after expenses. Load up a company with debt. Sell all the real estate and pay rent. Bloat executive salaries. Play games with shell companies and other middlemen. It’s not rocket science.

New comment by dd36 in "It's not a crime if we do it with an app"

dd36 — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 03:19:48 +0000

Doubtful. Most deals aren’t financed with debt.

There are many but off the top of my head Kroger buying Safeway. Visa buying Plaid. Nvidia buying Arm. Didn't they block a cell phone merger? A mattress merger?

New comment by dd36 in "DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL"

dd36 — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 21:05:01 +0000

Does Israel make ChatGPT?

New comment by dd36 in "It's not a crime if we do it with an app"

dd36 — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:28:01 +0000

Because there is collusion in the supply chain as well. The grocery stores won’t place your product, the distributors won’t distribute it or will charge you more, the farmers will charge you more. This is why horizontal and vertical consolidation were made illegal a century ago. Anti-competitive behavior has to be policed at every level.

New comment by dd36 in "It's not a crime if we do it with an app"

dd36 — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:23:42 +0000

Margins aren’t an objective measurement. Margins are easy to manipulate through shell companies and other costs.

Just look at PBMs. They all supposedly have small margins. However, once you peel back the layers, you see rebates and kickbacks and all kinds of illegal schemes to hide the real income.

New comment by dd36 in "It's not a crime if we do it with an app"

dd36 — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:17:38 +0000

Many mergers were squashed. The M&A market shrank considerably. There’s only so much they can do as far as bringing and prosecuting cases in four years.

New comment by dd36 in "It's not a crime if we do it with an app"

dd36 — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:14:14 +0000

Lina Khan did a ton of anti-trust but corporations seem to have realized Trump is transactional/pay to play. One can hope the strong antitrust continues but there’s little reason for optimism.