estearum

Yes

Land Value Tax does this with effectively zero enforcement complexity and across all forms of communal wealth creation (which ultimately gets baked into land values).

There's no such thing as "pure creativity," which I presume you mean "creative output not directly derived by prior inputs." The very concept is utter nonsense.

This doesn't even address the direct point. The question is how any of this is fundamentally different (difference in type and not just of "scale") from how human cognition works.

No, that's actually not true. The US is not "extremely well-funded." It's pretty much on-par with other advanced nations adjusted for PPP.

The vast majority of users on this website wouldn't be trusting something coming out of the USA, they'd be trusting something in the USA.

As I understand it, very little of Replit and Lovable (especially) are actually B2C. A lot of it is internal teams at mid-sized companies, which are a huge and demonstrably very fruitful customer segment, and one that Cloudflare does in fact serve already.

Cloudflare has already started releasing products that point in this direction. Not sure how far they will (or should) go, but it's really not categorically ridiculous or impossible or nonsensical, as you're implying.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-os/

The SaaS component of Shopify is also trivial now. That's not where Shopify's moat comes from either. You are very confused.

> Cloudflare's network could be emulated with proper planning and enough budget

lmfao

By this logic every single company on the planet would be a single-product company. The reality is that companies expand their offerings all the time – despite the cost, complexity, and risk of doing so.

A great time to expand your offerings is when there's an adjacent offering that's producing outsized returns for someone else, is easily replicable, and which you have an asymmetric advantage on.

I think everyone knows that when someone says "it's trivial" for a business to do something, it doesn't mean it's actually trivial. Doing anything of any value anywhere is non-trivial. It's shorthand for "doing Activity X is almost certainly achievable with an acceptable outlay of risk for Business Y."

What network effects?

And the reason for Cloudflare to do it is because there are several (apparently) very juicy businesses to be built by slapping a chat UI and off the shelf coding agent on top of Cloudflare infra... Not saying they should do this, but the rationale is pretty self-evident.

The reason for Replit to try going down the stack is platform risk and compressing margins from competitors who also have the brilliant idea of slapping a text box and off the shelf coding agents onto Cloudflare.

I'm not expressing an opinion on whether they should or shouldn't.

They're saying that it's trivial for Cloudflare to go up the stack (build Replit) while it's non-trivial for Replit to go down the stack (build Cloudflare).

The flagship stores yes, but that was the special case (which is universal) of the more US-specific case of e.g. "why the fuck are there Chipotles everywhere"

The other US phenomenon is mega-chains which can operate at much narrower margins (or even negative margins in some marquee locations).

Not in practice they're not. They want to. But can you actually link to any data centers powered by new nuclear reactors?

That's nice but empirically we know (and anyone can observe) that head impacts are pretty much the norm in ~100% of plays.

> The fact that they're a repeated part of the game and not occasional incidents is very, very bad.

As someone who has had multiple concussions in other sports, the impacts in youth football are absolutely sufficient to cause concussions and more minor (but still cumulatively damaging) trauma. The fact that they're a repeated part of the game and not occasional incidents is very, very bad.

Requiring a child to play football should be actual child abuse, and even allowing it should be frowned upon the way that letting a child play with a blowtorch is.

How would a futures market fix that...?

Okay, well if you weren't suggesting you can predict the outcome based on this slice of data, then "projectile" is a really stupid analogy. The defining characteristic of a projectile is that you can do this.

And the analogy is literally not useful in any way whatsoever.

It implies that you can know Anthropic's outcome from this slice of data. That is literally not true in any way at all.

Like it's not even remotely or analogously or roughly true.

Anthropic behaves like a high-growth business with a quarter of slowing growth. It does not behave like a baseball. Any conclusions you draw from analyzing it as a baseball will be de facto faulty because the two systems are nothing like one another. The most basic assumption of projectile analysis (that energy is not added in-flight) is the opposite of the most basic assumption of a business (that they are actively profit-seeking).

The analogy adds nothing except ambiguity at best and active falsehoods at worst.

Sure they can work very similarly. But they can also not behave very similarly.

Businesses can have stalled growth, degrading margins, etc. etc. and then simply... reverse it. They can raise more money. Their competitors can get regulated out of existence. They can do a literal infinite number of things that cannot be factored into a model like "a projectile."

That's why the projectile analogy is stupid as fuck. It suggests you can presuppose the conclusion by presupposing the conclusion.

Bad, misleading, and uninteresting ones, yeah pretty much.

Presupposing where they are on "the" S curve is itself presupposing the conclusion, duh.

Most businesses are stacks of S curves (except when they're not).

Correct. Which is why making a physical claim about a 2nd order derivation of a super dynamic system is goofy and misleading.

The analogy fails at precisely the thing it's attempting to do.

It's saying "like a projectile, you can predict the outcome based on just a sliver of data"

That is literally not true.

You're now talking about the expected trajectory.

Really, you're talking about expectations ("expected") of the expected ("price") trajectory (actual business performance).

If the above comment was intending to say "chart go up steeper make price higher, chart go up less steep make price lower", then no dispute there. But that carries virtually zero predictive information about whether the business will achieve "escape velocity" (whatever that means).

You absolutely cannot predict Anthropic's fate based on their growth rate slowing from Q2 to Q3. Obviously.

You can predict the resting place of a projectile with information like this. You cannot do so with a business, especially one as dynamic as Anthropic in an environment as dynamic as today's.

Businesses aren't projectiles

How would they know?! They've never read a book!

People are very watchful of the coming pop we all know is coming...?

It's not great when finance people are openly talking about trying to time the top.