>“I actually think we’re capable of taking whatever pricing we need,” said CFO Hugh Johnston in 2022. And the company did just that, raising prices by double digit percentages for seven straight quarters in 2022-2023.
I hate to say it, but was he proven wrong? People are still buying junk food and soda (their primary products) despite prices going up. Looking at Pepsis profit margin, it seems to have hovered between 9.5% and 10.5% since 2021.
The point of the complaint is that they were able to do this due to illegal collusion.
And even if people buy a lot of junk food, they might have bought competitors’ junk food. Laws are still laws even if you don’t like the people the laws protect.
Exactly pricing discrimination (i.e. selling at different prices to different customers) is absolutely legal and is market efficient in a market with multiple sellers and multiple buyers.
Pricing discrimination combined with monopsony(single large buyer) or monopoly ( single large seller) powers is not market efficient. It leads to higher prices by end consumers. Price discrimination via collusion + Walmarts monopsony in grocery industry violates that 1930s act and is illegal
Is that the point? The illegal collusion was with walmart to keep their prices artificially low compared to everyone else. They weren't colluding with coke to raise all soda prices.
See downthread comment[1], and please keep in mind the context of this conversation is specifically, "Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans than China is".
Chinese doctrine explicitly has labeled America as the enemy for 10-20 years, with a goal of taking a democracy by force (after crushing dissent in HK and taking it over earlier than promised), and steals the West’s IP, and manipulates American businesses, and is actively committing a genocide for the past decade.
That's all pretty hand wavey and abstract, not very convincing (for example, I'm pretty sure China is not committing a genocide in the US, and Western IP law is arguably not worth much respect anyway). I'm not saying China is without problems, I'm just saying they're less harmful to Americans than Amazon is.
You’re claiming that documented and active IP theft and anti-democracy and enemy-action doctrine is handwavy and better than a tax paying business that supports democracy and that is not trying to undermine the west? You’re wrong
I similarly can't understand how you can look at the US over the last 10-20 years and think the US's biggest threat is some country on the other side of the planet who makes the stuff that we ask them to make, and not the billionaires and megacorps who control every aspect of our economic and political system which directly lead to the situation we are in now. The call is coming from inside the house, man :)
I'm only familiar with Ford production and distribution facilities. Those parking lots are broadly full of Fords, but that doesn't mean that it's like this across the board.
And I've parked in the lot of shame at a Ford plant, as an outsider, in my GMC work truck -- way over there.
It wasn't so bad. A bit of a hike to go back and get a tool or something, but it was at least paved...unlike the non-union lot I'm familiar with at a P&G facility, which is a gravel lot that takes crossing a busy road to get to, lacks the active security and visibility from the plant that the union lot has, and which is full of tall weeds. At P&G, I half-expect to come back and find my tires slashed.
Anyway, it wasn't barren over there in the not-Ford lot, but it wasn't nearly so populous as the Ford lot was. The Ford-only lot is bigger, and always relatively packed.
It was very clear to me that the lots (all of the lots, in aggregate) were mostly full of Fords.
To bring this all back 'round: It is clear to me that Ford employees broadly (>50%) drive Fords to work at that plant.
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It isn't clear to me at all that Google Pixel developers don't broadly drive iPhones. As far as I can tell, that status (which is meme-level in its age at this point) is true, and they aren't broadly making daily use of the systems they build.
(And I, for one, can't imagine spending 40 hours a week developing systems that I refuse to use. I have no appreciation for that level of apparent arrogance, and I hope to never be suaded to be that way. I'd like to think that I'd be better-motivated to improve the system than I would be to avoid using it and choose a competitor instead.
It's kind of wild reading the writings of a neoliberal who wishes that the clock could be turned back to the Clinton or Obama administration. I think the worst part is that his own cherry picked quotes don't really support his thesis. His quote from the Economist doesn't even really focus on free trade, it focuses more on how China is outsmarting Europe.
We'll pass on Clinton's NAFTA, in fact, we probably want to dismantle NAFTA nowadays given that it had created the massive Rust Belt in the Midwestern States of US.
That would be an interesting play. Acquire a chip design and foundry company all because they couldn't meet the purposely stringent deadline, and then use their expertise and assets to produce AI chips for yourself.
You can even dissolve the uranium in the water and use the same substance for both fuel and propellant and so capable of reaching far higher temperatures than those that would cause any engine to melt.
Your last paragraph doesn't really make you come off as a libertarian at all. If Apple is truly a bad actor, then the libertarian response isn't to have the EU force them to use USB-C on iPhones, it's for people to move away from iPhones to other choices, which means Androids.
This is what I'm seeing in the design market. With Figma Make, you can write a prompt, tell it to use your design library, generate a flow, and then hand it off to developers and say "Hey, look at this, can you implement this?". Alternatively, you can use Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to pull in Figma design system elements via MCP, and generate flows that way. You can push features so much faster with the same or fewer people, and lets be honest, pushing more features in less time is the #1 metric at a lot of companies even if they claim otherwise.
I find it to be sometimes easier to utilize my Figma library to design what I want as I generally don't have to do rework. It gets annoying after awhile to waste tokens and context dealing with stupid small things like "Hey, the icon in the icon button is wrong." if you do prompting. Pulling in the same icon & icon button through a MCP is generally easier.
Presumably you can iterate on and manually tweak the design first, which is much quicker and less cumbersome than iterating on and tweaking the design when it's in clunky HTML/CSS/JS form and all the non-vector graphical assets are flattened/cropped etc.
I wonder what this means for UX designers like myself who would love to take a screen from Figma and turn it into code with just a single call to the MCP. I've found that Gemini 3 in Figma Make works very well at one-shotting a page when it actually works (there's a lot of issues with it actually working, sadly), so hopefully Opus 4.5 is even better.
I hate to say it, but was he proven wrong? People are still buying junk food and soda (their primary products) despite prices going up. Looking at Pepsis profit margin, it seems to have hovered between 9.5% and 10.5% since 2021.
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