Hacker News: wilkommen

New comment by wilkommen in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

wilkommen — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:50:12 +0000

I have had the chance recently to meet my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss at my current job and it is amazing how in this era of robber-baron capitalism we seem to be promoting exclusively the most unserious, irresponsible, and magical-thinking among us. The fish does seem to be rotting from the head. And it's not just some companies or institutions, it seems to be all of them. At least during the gilded age, the robber barons were serious people. I'd rather have Vanderbilt or Carnegie as my economic royalty than Mark Zuckerberg or Peter Thiel. Vanderbilt and Carnegie may have been evil, but at least they had their heads on straight.

New comment by wilkommen in "The tanks in Cushing, Oklahoma, are hitting bottom"

wilkommen — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:13:25 +0000

How is China reducing the consumption of transport fuels? Is that driven by changes in individuals' fuel consumption patterns or by a change on the industrial side?

New comment by wilkommen in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

wilkommen — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:50:36 +0000

Yes, it's much different in other countries. See https://substack.com/@doks/p-198191751

New comment by wilkommen in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

wilkommen — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:39:46 +0000

Good companies go bad because the American financial system and thus the companies that live within that system are geared for "shareholder returns" as the primary objective of existence for the corporation. If the objective of the corporation was simply to protect its continued existence, more akin to a nation-state or a club, then it would be possible to have a wider variety of corporations which each behave differently and behave more according to their own internal rules and principles instead of behaving according to the demands of external shareholders who only want money, even if it distorts or kills the company in the long run.

New comment by wilkommen in "Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?"

wilkommen — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:23:53 +0000

Yeah Pearl Jam did take a huge career hit trying to fight them, and that's admirable, but they shouldn't have had to do that. Why should artists carry the burden of having to sacrifice their careers to fight an illegal monopoly? That's the role of government. You may as well say that fans are to blame for going to ticketmaster-promoted concerts and buying tickets on ticketmaster because they were enabling ticketmaster. Both fans and artists are being harmed by the ticketmaster monopoly.

New comment by wilkommen in "Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?"

wilkommen — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:47:38 +0000

Could it be this podcast? https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/emergency-pod-the-live-natio...

New comment by wilkommen in "Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?"

wilkommen — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:44:54 +0000

Ticketmaster uses their monopoly power to unfairly squeeze the venues and the artists too. They're using their monopoly power to squeeze all sides of the live music marketplace - fans, artists, venues, and promoters. So the bad guys are really Ticketmaster, not the artists.

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

wilkommen — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:30:55 +0000

The stuff that old people need in their retirements to live is getting more expensive due to the types of shenanigans that PE firms are doing. So their pensions appear solvent now but when those old folks actually retire, their money won't go as far? Doesn't add up. I think the people who are really benefitting here are the usual suspects - the ultra rich, and the PE guys at the top doing this transfer really are evil.

New comment by wilkommen in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

wilkommen — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:44:52 +0000

None of these cases destroyed any of the defendants' monopoly status, so while there have been some "actions", there certainly haven't been any effective ones.

New comment by wilkommen in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

wilkommen — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:40:40 +0000

We need a cleansing forest fire of aggressive, effective antitrust enforcement. All we gotta do is enforce the laws that are already on the books, and do so in the spirit of the existing body of case law precedent.

New comment by wilkommen in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

wilkommen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:54:12 +0000

Only anti-trust action against big tech to break their ad monopoly (to make journalism profitable again) and breaking up media conglomerates (to reduce concentration of power in the journalism industry) can save journalism from becoming just a mouthpiece for the powerful. These things can only happen through politics. We need a political solution to save journalism.

New comment by wilkommen in "SpaceX files to go public"

wilkommen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:47:04 +0000

I like that, I think your method is better than mine - it's simpler so it's harder to game. It punishes the right thing.

New comment by wilkommen in "SpaceX files to go public"

wilkommen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:22:03 +0000

I agree - I think there should be a rule that prevents anyone who buys a stock from selling it inside the following 2 years or so. And another rule that says every stock must pay a dividend that is a fixed percentage of the company's profit, modifiable only rarely and only by the board of directors. Then anyone buying stocks would have to price them more by the actual present-day dividends and strength of the company in the present day than by what someone else might buy the stock for tomorrow. It would curb speculation and reward responsible companies that are building strength for the long term.

New comment by wilkommen in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

wilkommen — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:13:24 +0000

There's only so much land in the places where people want to live. You can't increase the housing supply enough to stop housing from being an asset in a society where wealth is sufficiently unequally distributed. By virtue of its unique scarcity, land (and therefore housing) will always be an asset, and in a society with increasing wealth inequality, the price of assets will always be going up.

New comment by wilkommen in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

wilkommen — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:38:51 +0000

I think that building more housing helps, but a lack of supply is not the only cause of high housing prices. Wealth inequality is also a huge driver, possibly the primary driver. If wealth is allocated in a society in a sufficiently lopsided way, then a small number of people can buy up literally all the assets in the society. Regular people are bidding against a small cadre of ultra-wealthy people who can't possibly spend all their money on consuption, so they use it to buy assets like other people's homes. In the aggregate, increasing the housing supply won't bring down housing prices if wealth inequality is also growing above a certain rate.

New comment by wilkommen in "What Drives Stock Market Returns? (2018)"

wilkommen — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:37:47 +0000

I find it reassuring. More people are waking up from our collective trickle-down, "free market hypothesis" fever dream and are starting to understand that there's nothing natural or rational about the stock market - it's just an elaborate wealth allocation machine that showers wealth on those who already have wealth (and showers more wealth on you, the more you already have). The stock market is about as natural or rational as the most Communist land redistribution program, except it runs in the other direction. Money is political, and politics is about power! Too many people are still brainswashed by elite propaganda to think a machine designed to increase the power of the rich is somehow a mechanism as natural as the sun and wind.

New comment by wilkommen in "What Drives Stock Market Returns? (2018)"

wilkommen — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:28:48 +0000

I think in the short to medium term, they will continue expanding the availability of credit and expanding the money supply when crashes happen in order to keep asset prices high. At some point there will be a breaking point, but I think 2009-style "Quantitative Easing" and 2020-style fiscal spending can and will happen again. So I'm still in, but this game won't last forever.

New comment by wilkommen in "What Drives Stock Market Returns? (2018)"

wilkommen — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:46:02 +0000

Idk how people write posts like this anymore. Clearly the stock market isn't rational, and prices of stocks are not tied to financial fundamentals. Stocks are essentially a deflationary alternative currency that only people with disposable income can afford. The rich (and to a smaller extent, the middle class) take the currency which devalues every year (USD) and use it to buy the currency which increases in value every year (stocks and other digital assets), and this is part of the funnel that increases the wealth of the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class. People who think valuations of stocks are tied to fundamentals are smoking medical-grade copium. I too wish that the backbone of our financial system was a not a corrupt, rigged game that benefits a small and decreasing number of people every year, but it is.

New comment by wilkommen in "Who smeared Richard Feynman? (2014)"

wilkommen — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:45:49 +0000

nominative

New comment by wilkommen in "The Great Unwind"

wilkommen — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:24:56 +0000

The entire stock market basically functions as a funnel of wealth from the middle class to the rich right now. When OpenAI and Anthropic IPO, they'll be megacap stocks and 401ks and pension funds the world over will invest in them. Then insiders will cash out, and the AI bubble will collapse. USD will have transferred from the retirement accounts of middle-class people to the rich. This is how all stock market crashes work. This one is especially interesting because the middle class is already so squeezed - how many more times can they pull this trick off? Seems like it can't go on many more times.