161–170 of 352 posts
I agree they should be regulated. The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. These big companies turn regular people into corporate livestock to serve the wealthy. If you were to analyze Facebook as if it were a country, the wealth gap among employees would be atrocious - The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value t…
Regulation only makes the largest companies that much more untouchable. Why not invest what would have been spent on regulation instead on education? That way the next pioneer could be fostered. Or invest in subsidies for health and wellness and food programs so the next Zuckerberg doesn't go hungry and can have the luxury to innovate (terrible analogy since he came from a middle class family but still). Or if you do…
If there's a "next Zuckerberg" out there, letting them go hungry would probably be the best course of action. It seriously concerns me that people aspire to be like someone who stole an idea then turned it into a global mass surveillance, manipulation, speech supression and propaganda machine.
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If Google doesn't have an effective monopoly then I don't think I understand the word. The only search engine relavant to my search results is Google and I don't here to many people talking about optimizing their SEO for bing.
It's not necessarily illegal to be a monopoly, it's illegal to behave in certain anti-competitive ways. For example: - Rockefeller made deals with the railroads that shipped Standard Oil to charge higher prices to other prospective oil shippers. - Rockefeller bought any competitor that was undercutting him and raised its prices so it stopped being a threat. - "Competing" firms met and drew up an agreement that neithe…
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Well at least we can get that out of the way; it is an affront then. These 4 companies (and more) have done more good than all the goodness of your heart will ever do. We have to be pragmatic and not just be bleeding hearts because it is endearing and it will make us popular. >to have all of us go forward as a species instead of concentrating the power in the hands of few. This is the problem you and others that thin…
>it is an affront then. You'll live. >These 4 companies (and more) have done more good than all the goodness of your heart will ever do Oh, certainly. Can we start listing all the bad they've done now? Because I can't, not even in a hundred lifetimes, do as much evil as those four. >That for some to win others must lose. No. This is just flawed. Indeed. If you're living in a dream. However, in most of the cases, many…
Millions have died from the perils of ideas such as yours so forgive me if I don't take your word for it.
>> Can we start listing all the bad they've done now?
You bet. List said evils and I guarantee you the sheer weight of the good in comparison will invalidate your claims.
>> Indeed. If you're living in a dream. However, in most of the cases, many people are losing, and few are winning.
Actually wealth over time has increased for majority of humans so you're WRONG. Things are getting better.
>> Look at Samsung's level of involvement in South Korea's government, certainly something you want, right?
Again, one simple instance of something that's gone awry that's incomparable to the magnitude of good that Samsung has done for the people in its country and around the world.
>> Absolutely! Unless you are poor, not living in a first world country, not living in a place where you have any chance of getting your company to a sizable level
I come from and live in a 3rd world country in Africa. I've had a mentor and director in my previous start up who started with nothing (I mean dirt poor) and built up a company that makes something in the order of tens of millions of dollars per year. Certainly no Amazon or Microsoft but no mean feat either. He in turn has friends who do way better than him. Point is, if he can do it, anyone in the world can do it and people should just stop complaining.
>> They're working infinitely harder than you, I or Larry Page have ever worked. And yet, here we all are, in better health, with more money, with more free time and a more satifying job than them. Go tell them they aren't at this level because they aren't working hard. I fucking dare you.
I'm a web developer now. I wasn't always. Before this, I did some of that hard labor you're talking about. I welded and did grunt work all while I took Lynda tuts by Kevin Skoglund to learn PHP.
>> You're putting more value on the accumulation of wealth to a few people than to the well-being of society.
I'm putting more value on common sense. My brother and I are avid readers of Austrian economics. Hans-Hermann hoppe even corresponds directly with my brother via email. I'm so glad we came across these works; they provided a level of clarity that I only see embodied in the valley by Peter Thiel. The reason I bring this up is:
We were recently discussing the dynamics of the economy of a local town nearby and here's what we noticed; there was a cycle with which resources moved about in the town; my brother runs a supermarket, he has a barber and gets a haircut, pays the barber. Some local suppliers will pass by while dropping of shipments and get a haircut, they pay the barber. The barber will at the end of the day need some groceries; he'll get them at the supermarket. And the cycle goes on and on. The most likely reason for someone not to earn a living in that town is that they aren't working - providing a good or service to someone else. That is all money is. There is very little dignity in handouts. There's nothing more fulfilling than rightfully earning what's yours.
I've noticed that what most people call the far right is basically a rebellion against common sense and basic rules of economics. I'm glad Trump won. If not for anything else, just as a statement that however far the left has gone, a subsequent and compelling statement had to be made. That statement was Trump.
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In general, I agree with your warning that Alexa and co. could limit choice. But is really anyone ordering just "a pizza" or "a lightning cable" by voice without further specification? Isn't customer satisfaction key for using the assistant in the future again? If using a virtual assistant for ordering, I'd instruct Alexa (or Google or Siri) to order a specific pizza in a specific size from a specific pizza delivery.…
But Alexa extracting a 5-10% (or even 30%) fee on all pizza places through that access definitely hurts all pizza businesses, anywhere. And those that opt out will miss that business.
Should we have kept the scribes?
I agree they should be regulated. The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. These big companies turn regular people into corporate livestock to serve the wealthy. If you were to analyze Facebook as if it were a country, the wealth gap among employees would be atrocious - The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value t…
Disclaimer: I work at Google > The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. [citation needed] A lot of things Google does -- a lot of the things people actually like about Google -- are possible only because it's a huge monolith. Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, y…
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And yet, only very large companies are able to make a certain class of investments in infrastructure and services — that push technology and society forward as a whole — that small to mid companies due to lack of capacity never could, and governments due to lack of vision and political will never would.
Not quite sure i follow. Do you mean like self driving cars, neural networks, mapping the human genome, or perhaps the internet? I guess IC's might be a good example, but the air force was really the only buyer that could afford them. I dunno, maybe we're moving to a new model. the 20th century way seemed to be to pour massive amounts of money into research at universities, then commercialize whatever whatever happen…
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it's not 'lack of vision and political will' that stymies government initiatives--that's some TED talk bs. and i shudder to think that we're necessarily dependent on the benevolence and 'vision' of large companies to drive society forward.
Then what does? Most of the innovation we have witnessed and enjoy in our society for the past 20-30 years has not been driven by governmental money or agencies but by private money.
It's true that private investment was also important but that generally only enters the picture when something is developed enough to the point that investors can see an eventual payoff. As a simple example, Google, Yahoo, and Lycos were all direct results from people like Larry Page getting NSF research grants:
https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660
That story repeats all over in every high-tech industry.
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>What is up with all this egalitarian nonsense? Just the wish to have a society that is able to evolve, to have all of us go forward as a species instead of concentrating the power in the hands of few. >There is an obsession with equality that I just don't get. That's called being a bit of a sociopath, but it gets better. >This is an affront on capitalism which has served to lift so many out of poverty. Good! Capital…
Well at least we can get that out of the way; it is an affront then. These 4 companies (and more) have done more good than all the goodness of your heart will ever do. We have to be pragmatic and not just be bleeding hearts because it is endearing and it will make us popular. >to have all of us go forward as a species instead of concentrating the power in the hands of few. This is the problem you and others that thin…
If companies are allowed to get as big as they want, then it naturally constrains other smaller companies from competing. It's not a free market anymore, it's a few big fish in a small lake. Good luck not being a predator.
This has happened before. We had massive conglomerates in the late 1800s. Thankfully some leaders with vision (Roosevelt) broke them up.
Egalitarianism does not == the USSR or other failed experiments. Those became anti-egalitarian as soon as the party vanguard took control in the middle of the revolution. Egalitarianism is an ideal state that can coexist with capitalism. What you are advocating is some kind of dystopian future where monetary might makes right and society is run by a few non democratic organizations.