Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a very simple reason why it does very little to substantiate its core claim: The claim is simply wrong and therefore can't be substantiated
so, you do not believe prices are inflating?
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Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
371–380 of 457 posts
Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
that is not a thing and that page will probably be gone soon. that is at most an attempt to control the narrative, and throw the growing inequality under the rug as some sort of mass hysteria. lame.
It is literally explicitly addressing the situation where these indicators claim everything's okay even though no one feels like it is - the idea that just because economic health metrics are up, doesn't mean anything for the average American.
it's actually saying the opposite.
it's claims is that everything really is better, but the "vibe" is to complain. it's a counter to the "silent majority" suffering in red states. it's a inane political spin that did not take on.
Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
who do you think economists also listen to?
I hope they listen to data. Either that they gather themselves or gathered by reputable organizations. Consumer confidence index for example tries to gather the sentiment of the consumers.
data says whatever you want it to. nobody will ever make a model that is devoid of personal interest. even your example just measure how bad a product can be for maximum profit. i.e. buying ten disposables is better than one good product.
where t f people got that holy image of economists?
Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about the size of the mill, but the capital cost to build a new one. No one is willing to invest the capital in building new mills because the old ones can always undercut their prices and kill them long before they turn a profit. It's the economic equivalent of a prisoner's dilemma.
That works against a large new entrant. No industry is going to lower their massive collective profit just to shoo away a small new entrant.
Natural monopolies due to high capital costs are businesses like TSMC and ASML - you're not going to get a "small new entrant" with 4nm lithography for making high-end microchips.
Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone knows that a good reimplementation of CUDA will make them trillions but despite 15 years, no one has made anything even close to it. There’s profit to be made and no entrants. How can we explain this? If your answer is “AMD et al tried” you aren’t paying attention to just how pathetic and shallow their efforts have been and still are.
Every GPU vendor knows that actually supporting a reimplementation of CUDA for their hardware immediately signs them up for two problems: 1. Protracted lawsuits with the (now) second-most-valuable company in the world. 2. Any significant customers being loudly reminded by Nvidia that the EULA for CUDA tools prohibits their use on non-Nvidia hardware. The problem is not the technical challenge of reimplementing the CU…
These days, you don't really need to support CUDA, just PyTorch gets you most of the way there.
You have Google TPUs, Amazon Inferon, a ton of smaller players that aren't quite getting traction - but there's a ton of investment there.
Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
#376I very much agree with the premise that economists unduly focus on a few metrics of dubious quality - labor force participation, personal consumption expenditures, market capitalization, wage growth, etc - and overfit them to construct a coherent narrative about the "strength" of the economy and what the experience of living in that economy must be like. There's a story right now being peddled by all the talking head…
So I was just buying some electronic components on eBay and noticed that once again Chinese product sellers (and their US resellers) lie, cheat and poison US customers. This 100W solar panel for $12.99 is actually 5W:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/165973941939
The pictures all prominently say "100W". The specs says output of 5V 2A (10W). The specs also say max output of 5V 1A (5W). It is nowhere near 100W. Customer rating of the seller is 99.1%. People expect to be lied to? I've been buying lots of stuff, both professionally and personally for many years and this has been a concerning trend. China is selling us childrens toys that contain lead paint and lead based solder in electronics. Laser pointers that can easily blind you labeled as safe at 5mW but really have no IR filter (to cut costs) so they output 50 to 150mW which people can't see and which can invisibly blind them. Electrical products that are not UL certified and are not safely designed (there are teardown channels on Youtube where they take apart products and they'll find AC powered stuff where the ground line is left hanging loose inside, not connected to anything). And our government lets this happen, has been letting this happen for decades. Ebay profits from it. No one is held accountable. What happened to law? Like Truth In Advertising? What happened to UL listing? What happened to fraud prevention? Our government is not fulfilling it's function. Crime is rampant and obvious. This is an obvious and serious failure of government. China is cheating US customers (and Chinese customers also apparently), and is poisoning and harming us. Seems like an absolutely real Chinese plot to attack democracy and it is working and our government is letting it happen. Why? Because "cheap stuff"? eBay profits? I think people see this kind of thing and think that there is no rule of law any more, which influences them and corrupts their behavior as well. Everybody is doing it, so they think they should also. Any thoughts about this? It seems to have been a gradual loosening of standards. It's happened across the business world, in government and in policing. The police won't investigate a crime unless it involves more than $10,000 or harms a person. Business advice for startups is to "fake it until you make it". Hospitals will charge people without insurance 20 times the normal price. Corporations considered fines for breaking the law the cost of doing business. Private equity "extracts value" by destroying companies. It seems like everyone has given up and corruption rules the day and everyone has to watch out for themselves. Are there just too many people now making the world too complex to oversee? Maybe these systems have never worked because they rely on most people complying and a lot of people now cheat? Maybe the internet/web makes it too easy to start a new company identity if reputation is lost? Have corporations captured government and hollowed out law? The level of lawlessness seems to have grown a lot; corporations, government departments, and police agencies all often just disregard demands from higher up for accountability and say they refuse to provide requested data. Go ahead and sue them and they'll pay the fine (years from now), continue doing it, and pass the costs on.
Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When telephone systems were invented, lots of telephone companies sprang up and ran wires everywhere. They did and cities ended up looking like this http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--91pqSjxr... There is not enough space to dedicate to electrical and internet wiring with a competition model like this. The physical space is a natural monopoly. What should be done is to treat the wiring as a utility…
Which proves my point. It was not cost that prevents multiple sets of wires being laid. It's regulation, and frankly rather poor management by the government. For example, a road nearby was widened for bike lanes. While they were at it, a trench was dug before the repaving to enlarge the water/sewer pipes. I emailed the people in charge that they should consider burying the power lines, too. The power lines ran on te…
>Which proves my point. It was not cost that prevents multiple sets of wires being laid. It's regulation, and frankly rather poor management by the government.
Do you look at the picture I linked, and think this is a preferable end state over some extra regulatory cost? That you would rather have those sets of cables all over the place and think the government is preventing this better state?
If you do, that's an opinion you can have, but I also think we have fundamentally different views of the world.
Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sort of industry gets regulated because letting people build multiple incompatible networks is an extremely expensive thing to do. The railways often built incompatible tracks, signaling systems, and so forth, which was a problem nation's still struggle with. Power companies created incompatible systems. Japan is famous for running on two incompatible electrical grids to this day.
There are enormous economic forces that push for standardization. For example, your keyboard is likely connected via USB. USB isn't a government standard. Neither is Standard C. And endless other things that the market standardized. Even 2*4 lumber is standardized. Gasoline is standardized. And so on. > Power companies created incompatible systems. They're usually granted government monopolies.
Ever since the iPhone, USB stopped being an actual standard to connect accessories to computers, until it became a (EU) government standard.
It is actually a great example to the opposite. The history of USB as a connector is of a direct consequence of the IBM PC, itself a standard. The only reason USB became a widespread standard is that there was a widespread standard computer and, as we see today with many other forms of computers, that is largely an accident : smartphones do not have a widespread standard, neither do gaming consoles, etc...
Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
#379The termites thing is kind of amusing. But isnt much of whats described in the article properly known as “rent seeking”? A monopoly might be the ultimate form of rent seeking. But for example a company that buys other companies/products in bulk to trap customers, but never improves or maintains those products and increases prices, is not only engaged in rent seeking but probably committing fraud. But expectation frau…
Yeah, it is just rent seeking behavior, often with regulatory capture.
We don't need to invent new terms for it.
And the sloppy presentation here with the 'clever' analogy clearly didn't do the topic well based on the upvoted comments.
Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
#380Whatever happened to "your margin is my opportunity"?
Regulatory capture (in addition to all the other answers you got)