Links and Notes - October 28th 2025

Economics is hard

View on Threads

Saw these posts on threads and was wondering to myself about this statement. I keep running into it. Tax the rich, and the rich shall leave. Firstly, what a bunch of selfish gits. Second, I wonder if a better metric than number of businesses fleeing is to show if the overall tax collected through the net dropped or rose. If it went up, success! Right?

Or is that short term thinking where you lose large growth that could have come later?

Also, is it a narrow view of to just look at companies leaving without asking the question of downsides if they stay because of tax breaks? Sure, GDP rising is great. But if it accumulates in a small portion of society only, everything eventually breaks.

Economics is hard man.

iRobot and its valuations

Saw this on threads:

Followed by these conversations:

Also, according to commenters, this is wrong. The EU commission blocked the deal. Not USA FTC.

Firstly, I need to read up on some of the robot vacuums in China and see how many of them receive infusion from the government. A lot of Chinese innovation feels like it runs on government sponsorship instead of traditional capitalism where Big Co. accumulates and owns the market + innovation (Which eventually stagnates in the process of enshitification). For example, the robot vacuum I use is the Xiaomi S20. And Xiaomi absolutely has received investment from the government multiple times. But whether any of these are related or make sense is not something I can pretend to attest to with my limited knowledge.

But at the end of the day, I also don't know if iRobot's valuation is a result of it not being acquired or if it saw the writing on the wall and opted to go for an acquisition. I don't know if not being acquired is an excuse for not innovating further. I don't know if the market going towards lower priced robots is something you can blame on the FTC/EU commission or if this is just a failure on iRobot's part to differentiate itself as a high end device. Apple products still sell extremely well in a market full of cheaper mobile devices. Even flagship premium Android devices sell well in a market full of devices made by Xiaomi and Huawei. There's lots of "well that's because of X and Y" arguments one could throw in here. But to me that's the point. If those don't exist for iRobot, did iRobot simply make products that have no differentiation from the commoditized lower price point of this market? If so, that's not a failure of the acquisition regulation space is it?

Overall thoughts: Economics is complicated af. And I feel like all of this "discussion" is just pretending that you can deliver all the nuance needed to argue a complex topic like this in a few hundred characters.

Either way, just like with the taxing of the rich causing them to leave being a debatable point, it feels quite debatable to state that a merger blocked resulted in a company failing. It feels like the company stopped innovating

Meta's ghost posts may have a booboo

Please appreciate the pun!

Meta's has released ghost posts for threads. Ephemeral posts designed to vanish in 24 hours. Stories for text. While the idea is great and I am fully in favour of it, I think that the execution of it is currently setup to fail.

To me, the implementation forgets what made stories from Snapchat and then Instagram useful.

1. People did not want to feel the pressure of posting something permanent. They wanted a way to share something that would go away which would let them be, more real.
2. People did not want to pollute the feeds with endless posting. This meant that someone could share pictures and videos from their day at a theme park without turning someone else's feed into an endless scroll of posts from 1 person.
3. Therefore, stories lived on their own. Equally important, stories from a specific individual lived on its own. This meant that looking at stories was an intentional action. Looking at a specific person's stories was also an intentional action. If I wasn't interested in someone's visit to a corporate exhibition, I could just swipe out of it entirely (or tap furiously until I went to the next person's stories).

Put all of this together and stories really did give people a way to spontaneously share things from their life which they might have held private otherwise. I believe that all of these elements needed to work together for the idea to take hold.

Ghost posts are unfortunately carrying only element number 1. They last for 24 hours and they go away. They have a little bit of element number 3; you can tap the menu and access ghost posts separately. But you cannot, at this time, separate ghost posts from your standard feed.

This means that the pressure to ensure you aren't oversharing is going to be a thing still since you know that all those posts are just going to end up on someone's feed and probably make them unfollow you for hyperactivity.

I'm excited for the idea, but I think the current execution of Ghost posts are a miss. But, I also don't think it's unfixable. It really could be a matter of moving elements around. At the same time, to truly fix it, Threads may need to do something fundamental to the home screen

This blog doesn't have a comment box. But I'd love to hear any thoughts y'all might have. Send them to [email protected]

Posted on October 28 2025 by Adnan Issadeen