If a big company in dominant position is allowed to gobble up any and all upstart competitors that's bad for competition, and it is the FTC's job to preserve competition.
It sounds like you are actually upset at Congress, which created FTC and gave it the power to decide if you can sell your startup. FTC is just doing the job prescribed by Congress.
I do love it. Companies don't exist solely to enrich their founders, they exist to provide a benefit to society. There needs to be a balance, of course, but if allowing a sale does not benefit society, then we should not allow it.
> your startup
You're under the misconception that companies "belong" to individuals. Companies are legal frameworks that society has decided upon. We could legally decide that M&A just isn't allowed, ever, if we wanted to. (I don't think that would be a good idea, but I hope you see my point.)
Reductionist. Your phrasing it like the onky options are full central planning and libertarianism. Theyre both wrong. You need the free market to do what it is capable of, and regulate it when its isnt. The free market was going to let monopolies form. We have all already agreed thats bad. Khan's policies just updated that to the tech sphere
Actually, the owners not being on the hook when payroll comes due and the business is out of cash is exactly the protection that society has extended to incorporated businesses. But I'd be happy to horse trade unregulated m&a activity for owners, boardmembers and executives having full liability exposure, financial and criminal.
I’m not sure why everyone is positioning this as a “gotcha”. I may be off base, but was it advertised as 100% autonomous? I’m just impressed with the form factor, dexterity, and battery life. Feels like everyone’s grasping at straws to cast the event as a failure.
I agree. Also, especially in the extremely crowded and noisy context - what would have been the chances to have the demo working so well?
In fact, even if the robots worked very well autonomously, you would still have wanted a way to ensure that the demo is successful - the same way Steve Jobs did with the iPhone demo, Larry Ellison did with the Oracle servers demo, etc.
So many stories like that in the history of famous product launches.
The one thing that bothers me a little is that if you look at the robots dancing, they are only moving the upper body; their feet are always on the ground. I would have liked to see them having enough ability to dance and move the legs too… then, again, maybe the gazebo they were in was just too space-constrained, or it was just too risky to do that in the demo - given the crowd, and all the chaotic party context. When you set up a demo, you have to account for the edge cases where your product glitches, not just for what it mostly does very well.
Anyhow, these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones), and, at the pace AI is evolving, it is not hard to see how these types of issues get ironed out over the time horizon leading to the launch.
The Optimus demo did do a great job at actually making people see a world in which robots just roam around and interact with humans everywhere. .
Mechanical and electrical engineering are real work, too. Demonstrating progress on the physical machine might be interesting even if its software isn't done yet.
Given that the event was about the 'future of autonomy', yes people were expecting that products presented are autonomous. A lot of people were duped and a lot of media coverage assumed it was all autonomous.
But hey, it's coming from a company that's selling something called Full Self Driving for the past 10 years, so the deception is not really that surprising.
Makes you wonder how Trevor Milton feels about all this - after all, they only stated in the infamous video that the truck is 'in motion' - never advertised it's 100% an 'autonomous motion' :)
Clearly a rorschach for people. The cars were driving autonomously and the improvements in Optimus’ form factor were impressive, so to me it seems pedantic to complain that the bar tending and rock paper scissors weren’t 100% autonomous.
Are you a Trevor Milton fan? I didn’t see as much merit in his body of work.
Not a fan of Milton at all. The guy belongs in jail. But so do Musk with his lies and deceptions about Tesla.
Btw, are we so sure that the cars shown were driving autonomously and not remotely operated ? Not that it's difficult to have a self-driving car in a cinema studio these days... But for all Musk said, 'there's no people in them', 'as you can see, the cars just going by with no people', 'fully autonomous' (like FSD ?).
(Don't get me wrong - it's a good company, that did achieve some impressive things in the past. But there are clear Enron vibes to me).
While India is building the infrastructure to not starve and drown they will not have sufficient exploitable labor to "grow" as translated into building and manning sweatshops and factories.
Former GE investor here - everything you've said is spot on.
Our modus operandi was that a growth equity investment should _never_ go to zero. The new portfolio thinking has shifted to the right: 1/3 make 1-2x, 1/3 make 2-3x, 1/3 make 3x or more.
Why does facebook continue to allow the running of political ads and all the headache that comes with it (despite it being a minuscule piece of it's overall revenue)? Power. You can see this as being the most tone-deaf way possible to address the problem, or as a power grab to become an arbiter of truth.
> President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and other Republican election groups criticized tech giant Google on Tuesday for making it harder for political advertisers to target specific types of people. The GOP groups said the changes will lead directly to suppressing voter turnout and would “disproportionately” hurt Republican candidates.
Said right-wing currently controls the Senate, the White House, is appointing large numbers of Federal judges, etc.
It's not shocking for Facebook to want to avoid worsening relations with people holding significant power to regulate them. No one really wants to be the subject of a Trump tweetstorm, either.
