41–50 of 151 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The EU isn't multilateral. Multilateral would be the EU + the US + Japan + China + other smaller economies, or at least the majority of those players.
In this context the EU is most certainly multilateral. The laws being evaluated were agreed upon by 28 member states.
> It means making it easier for consumers to move their data from one company to another I think this would be absolutely brilliant. The ability to readily move data from one service provider to another would provide a much-needed boost for competition in the digital space. I don't know how common it is, but at least in Finland one can move their mortgage from one bank to another if they get a better deal elsewhere […
What type of data are you wanting to move? Would you just want a huge movable block of space that you could mount somewhere?
Growth is globalized. Global companies get a disproportionate share of growth. Therefore giants will become increasingly large relative to non-global entities. I'm not sure what the specific problems are. Which makes prescribing a fix impossible.
One specific problem is that global companies are currently able to engage in tax arbitrage where they get to shuffle their profits around the world to wherever the most favorable tax rate is. This leaves many of the countries that actually host these companies and provide services to them - like educated employees, transportation infrastructure, and a judicial system - without any tax revenue from the company.
Starbucks is headquarted in the United States. Their research in Canada. Their beans from Columbia. European distribution is out of Germany. London finances new franchises. A location in France sells a latte for 4€.
How much of that 4€ is profit and how big of a slice does each country get? Because each country has a very fair claim to say that they deserve a slice of the profit pie.
It's impossible. There is no single answer. There is no moral system that precisely describe to which countries go which dollar.
IMO, this problem is mostly a factor of the consolidation of finance. The roll up of banking makes it impossible for smaller enterprises to get traditional capital. We moved away from the old, boom/bust distributed banking model towards a weird form of command economy with a cartel of mega-banks, which are really just proxies for the government. People blame technology for the post-recession economy, but I think the…
Sarbanes-Oxley probably played a role as well. Successful startups now chase acquisition over IPO, which leads to the creation of huge empires (Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft) and few medium-sized players.
It's today's very low interest rates that fuel "private equity", which is usually debt at some level.
A libertarian explanation is that in the age of the Regulatory State, it's often more important to be the biggest lobbyist than to make the best product. "In the Game of Crony Capitalism, you lobby or you die."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The EU isn't multilateral. Multilateral would be the EU + the US + Japan + China + other smaller economies, or at least the majority of those players.
In this context the EU is most certainly multilateral. The laws being evaluated were agreed upon by 28 member states.
In this context, multilateral means engaging at least a majority of the biggest economies on the planet. The EU solo-ing it is unilateral, just like the US solo-ing it would be unilateral, even if we described US law as agreed upon by 50 member states.
A libertarian explanation is that in the age of the Regulatory State, it's often more important to be the biggest lobbyist than to make the best product. "In the Game of Crony Capitalism, you lobby or you die."
Isn't this a common libertarian fallacy - that government and private enterprise are 2 separate entities. Government is bad and should be restricted from interference and private enterprise should not be regulated and market forces will auto-converge to some nice maximum. In reality there is really not that much difference between government and large enterprises. Funny enough that can also be reconciled with the lib…
That is not how I understand libertarianism. It is not that government is bad. But that government's role is to be the rule maker and referee. The government should not be playing the game.
Rather than "regulate" a large company, the government should make sure the rules don't hinder competitors. Ultimately, it is more competitors each trying something different that drives price down and quality up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gvien the forum we're on, it's worth pointing out that today's white collar laborers are capturing one or two orders of magnitude less of the value they're creating than the blue collar workers of 1990's detroit. 360 billion* divided by 1.2 million = 300000 "per employee". Typical salary to 40,000ish-100,00ish range for laborers/engineers. The disparity in those numbers isn't so bad at all. Conversely, 1 trillion div…
Funny cause amazon is closer to the 330K per employee mark. Wonder why their P/E is so high? Assuming it took all of walmart's sales it would only get 4 times bigger then now. how much profit can it extract?
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN&fstype=ii&ei=...
If I'm wrong and they are still plowing money back into everything and are still throwing off numbers like this (compared to the past) ~ that's simply amazing.
even after thinking through that defense - a 191 P/E is above my understanding. I think their technology and software revenues are seen a hyper growth