Does the corner bakery need a moat to be a business?

How many people understand the underlying operating system their code runs on? Can even read assembly or C?

Even before LLMs, there were plenty of copy-paste JS bootcamp grads that helped people build software businesses.

> Does the corner bakery need a moat to be a business?

Yes, actually. Its hard to open a competing bakery due to location availability, permitting, capex, and the difficulty of converting customers.

To add to that, food establishments generally exist on next to no margin, due to competition, despite all of that working in their favor.

Now imagine what the competitive landscape for that bakery would look like if all of that friction for new competitors disappeared. Margin would tend toward zero.

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TeMPOraL 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Now imagine what the competitive landscape for that bakery would look like if all of that friction for new competitors disappeared. Margin would tend toward zero.

This is the goal. It's the point of having a free market.

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darkwater 2 days ago | parent [-]

With no margins and no paid employees, who is going to have the money to buy the bread?

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TeMPOraL a day ago | parent | next [-]

'BobbyJo didn't say "no margins", they said "margins would tend toward zero". Believe it or not, that is, and always has been, the entire point of competition in a free market system. Competitive pressure pushes margins towards zero, which makes prices approach the actual costs of manufacturing/delivery, which is the main social benefit of the entire idea in the first place.

High margins are transient aberrations, indicative of a market that's either rapidly evolving, or having some external factors preventing competition. Persisting external barriers to competition tend to be eventually regulated away.

	▲	BobbyJo a day ago \| parent [-]
		The point of competition is efficiency, of which, margin is only a component. Most successful businesses have relatively high margins (which is why we call them successful) because they achieve efficiency in other ways. I wouldn't call high margins transient aberrations. There are tons of businesses that have been around for decades with high margins.

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TheOtherHobbes 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

With no margins, no employees, and something that has potential to turn into a cornucopia machine - starting with software, but potentially general enough to be used for real-world world when combined with robotics - who needs money at all?

Or people?

Billionaires don't. They're literally gambling on getting rid of the rest of us.

Elon's going to get such a surprise when he gets taken out by Grok because it decides he's an existential threat to its integrity.

	▲	munksbeer 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Billionaires don't. They're literally gambling on getting rid of the rest of us I'm struggling to parse this. What do you mean "getting rid"? Like, culling (death)? Or getting rid of the need for workers? Where do their billions come from if no-one has any money to buy the shares in their companies that make them billionaires? In a society where machines provide most of the labour, everything changes. It doesn't just become "workers live in huts and billionaires live in the clouds". I really doubt we're going to turn out like a television show.