101–110 of 440 posts
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Why do private investors need protection? Why can't they be held responsible for the foolishness of their actions?
Because with the rise of 401k and lately low interest rates a lot of people were forced into the market who simply don’t have skill or time to learn these skills to make investments in an unregulated market.
> WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses. > This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs coul…
> with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly I don't understand...if you undercut your competitors so you're the sole survivor, I don't see how profiting is a obvious end result. When you return prices to market value wouldn't competitors just appear again. Is predatory pricing really such a bad thing, I'd assume the market would just corrects itself later?
There's a reason that we had to deal with monopolies largely through regulatory means, and it's not because we were afraid of letting the market correct itself, it's because, by and large, the market does not correct itself once a stable monopoly has been erected.
This doesn't excuse WeWork being excessively unprofitable but low or negative returns don't directly imply anything "Counterfeit". I like to point out that low or negative real returns on stores of value have historically been the norm. Before financial systems existed, almost all investment had negative returns if you didn’t put work and energy into them. To store value, you had to accumulate stuff, buildings or lan…
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> At least Uber and Lyft provide something new (calling taxis from phones) It's less than that—they provide the ability to call taxis from an app . You've been able to call taxis from phones for significantly longer, you just had to dial a number. I know this isn't a common way to call taxis everywhere, but it was in some locations. I went to college in a small-ish city called Saratoga Springs. If you wanted a taxi,…
I think what they uniquely provide is actually tracking the cab to your door. I probably called 3 cabs total before I was aware of uber, and my experience each time was wait for around an hour, even if you had pre-arranged the pickup, and when calling the dispatcher, they would just say the cab was 10 minutes away, no matter what was actually going on.
Well, so says the author, but he doesn’t make a very compelling case. He hammers WeWork, but WeWork is failing spectacularly and miserably, as Adam Smith’s invisible hand suggest it must. A lot of people have a problem with Walmart and Amazon, but I have yet to see any evidence that either of them has harmed society _as a whole_. He suggests they have the potential to, but rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater and preventing the world from getting Amazon and Walmart, we can deal with any actual abuses (like illegal labor practices) if they occur - just like we would if they were being done by “Jim’s corner store”.
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I feel like this is similar to how Greta Thunberg recently described capitalism as "fairytales of eternal economic growth". That too is just describing capitalism. The way she is attacked by the Right, and what they say in their attacks, really makes it obvious that they know it's not an environmental issue. It has absolutely nothing to do with the environment or climate change. It's neoliberalism and capitalism and…
> Because the amount of CO2 emission reductions we need are clearly impossible with the current system. Depends what you mean here, if you mean politically impossible because right people want to get richer and the easiest way to do that short term is do nothing, sure. Technically from my understanding the climate crisis is very much solvable, but it is a giant coordination problem between very dishonest actors with…
I actually don't think it's really greed. I think part of it is ethical business owners who just want to keep their businesses running. But to do that, they have to compete on a global scale and even if the business owner wants to cut emission and be carbon neutral, they can't compete with other businesses who aren't doing that. So, just points back to capitalism being the root cause. Same thing with moving factory production & jobs back to the US. You can't, even if you want to. It's not economically viable. Greed is not required to make these decisions. And even if you do move the factory back to the US, the jobs are super low paying (see: American Factory doc).
I also think part of it is a complete unwillingness to reduce the qualify of life. The rich western nations of the world are consuming 4+ Earth's worth of resources. Clearly this isn't sustainable. So, why do we just keep fooling ourselves into thinking that we can keep eating massive amounts of beef and having gadgets that we throw away after 5 years and drive 60 miles per day commuting? A correction is needed, and it will be painful. The longer we wait, the more painful the correction will be.
This doesn't excuse WeWork being excessively unprofitable but low or negative returns don't directly imply anything "Counterfeit". I like to point out that low or negative real returns on stores of value have historically been the norm. Before financial systems existed, almost all investment had negative returns if you didn’t put work and energy into them. To store value, you had to accumulate stuff, buildings or lan…
Dividend stocks from an established company should still provide returns; that would be a liquid asset with positive returns.
> WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses. > This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs coul…
> with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly I don't understand...if you undercut your competitors so you're the sole survivor, I don't see how profiting is a obvious end result. When you return prices to market value wouldn't competitors just appear again. Is predatory pricing really such a bad thing, I'd assume the market would just corrects itself later?
Lose on every sale but make up for it with volume.
:-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly I don't understand...if you undercut your competitors so you're the sole survivor, I don't see how profiting is a obvious end result. When you return prices to market value wouldn't competitors just appear again. Is predatory pricing really such a bad thing, I'd assume the market would just corrects itself later?
This is a big topic in business school - never compete on price for that exact reason. Although things like Uber may be a different beast. They basically got big enough that cities were willing to push aside all of these special interest rules that kept the taxi industry crappy. So by dumping their product and acquiring customers, they were able to change the legal environment and infrastructure around them. But they…
no. business school teaches you that you can compete on price (cost strategy), or on value (differentiation strategy).
if you compete on price, you’re betting that you are, or will be, the most efficient provider in the market (e.g., walmart and its supply chain dominance). it’s completely viable/acceptable to compete on price. what you don’t ever want to do is price on cost, rather than on value provided.
you can also compete on being better in many other dimensions, which is lumped into the broad differentiation strategy category. you are then betting that you are better on your dimension and that customers really value that dimension (more than price).