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Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

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Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#441

Post by datavirtue »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #433
apsec112 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since 2016, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have risen quickly for people in the bottom quartile, while for upper-income workers they've been stagnant. Obviously, most people on HN are still better off than manual laborers, but the gap has narrowed substantially (a big reversal from 1995-2015) and that's a good thing. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

I'm sure those rural workers watching their towns disintegrate around them will be happy to know they are at least making a extra couple bucks an hour.

And all of it gets burnt up as soon as they break out of the work-eat-sleep routine and get confronted with the expenses of going on vacation or just going fishing.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#442

Post by datavirtue »

rangestransform wrote: post #232
netbioserror wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to completely miss the anecdotal point about rural cultural decay. You can point to a chart showing rising wage growth all day, but if it's happening at the expense of long-lived communities being hollowed out, you're effectively celebrating peoples' destitution. It is incredible how Internet armchair technocrats will attempt to reduce human existence to a few equations and wonder why broader populations despise…

Rural existence is already subsidized by urban dwellers, I dunno what more they expect

I think it's the other way around.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#443

Post by datavirtue »

paulmd wrote: post #167
Spooky23 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two Americas, the one that HN folks inhabit and the underclass. The former is doing great. The latter has grown and shifted. I grew up in a rural community that was in the process of unraveling from a prosperous farming and light industrial area to a rural slum. There are zero operational farms in that area today. The one I worked for as a teen was in continuous operation since the Dutch colonial period. Th…

When the proverbial one-horse town/single-industry company town has the single-industry leave town, what exactly do you want anyone to do about it? We already shovel in far more tax dollars maintaining infrastructure for a handful of remaining occupants even when the economic activity no longer justifies the spend. What further burden, exactly, do you think the rest of the world owes ex-rural communities that have de…

We are having the hard talk. Have you not noticed the populist facist uprising?

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#444

Post by roenxi »

HWR_14 wrote: post #416
roenxi wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example I like is Internet Explorer. IE had a "monopoly" back in the early 2000s and made up something like 90% of the browser market. Then Firefox came along and broke the market open, then Google and Apple rolled in like bulldozers [0] and we got to a healthy 4-player market. Everywhere except for South Korea. You can still read articles on it to this day [1]. Regulations had an unfortunate interaction that mad…

IE didn't lose in the market when Firefox came along. IE lost when the government fined Microsoft billions of dollars and forced it to relinquish it's monopoly position. Meanwhile the current market is Chrome, reskinned Chrome and Safari. Hardly a healthy marketplace.

> IE lost when the government fined Microsoft billions of dollars and forced it to relinquish it's monopoly position.

How did that work? Did they send around an agent to uninstall it from computers one-by-one?

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#445

Post by sudosysgen »

WalterBright wrote: post #383
sudosysgen wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

The IBM PC was never a government standard.

I never claimed as much. The IBM PC was a short-lived accidental scandal that IBM didn't fully intend, but couldn't stop when they failed to sue clean-room BIOSes out of existence. Only because of this was USB possible, and even then only for 10 years before it stopped being really universal, until the EU stepped in.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#446

Post by jnwatson »

jmyeet wrote: post #276
Animats wrote: post #211

Four. That's the magic number. There have to be four competitors of significant size before prices go down. There are both EU and US studies substantiating this. It's been seen in cellular phone networks, ISPs, drugstores, and banks. Drop below the threshold of four, and the magic happens. Prices go up, margins go up, and consumers lose. Four should be the basis of antitrust policy. Less than four, and there are two…

Speaking generally, not to you specifically, it seems like a ton of people see the problems created by capitalism and decide the solution is even more capitalism . I don't think there's a magical number of competitors that fixes things. We see an interesting phenomenon in commercial landlords where we have a ton of players but they all use the same software [1], which creates an effective monopoly even though it's no…

Capitalism is a system that needs to be within operating parameters to function. Prevention of monopolies and cartels is an important part of those operating parameters.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#447

Post by pydry »

gruez wrote: post #114
pydry wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing went up globally because of local policies all across the world all at the same time, huh? Perhaps housing went up because of a global increase in wealth inequality.

>Housing went up globally because of local policies all across the world all at the same time, huh? 1. source for "Housing went up globally"? 2. You don't really need every jurisdiction to by NIMBY for global house prices to go up. For instance if half the world is NIMBY and the other half is "meh", and housing prices in the NIMBY half went up 50% while the other half stayed the same, you'd still observe that "Housin…

https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2021/10/18/housing-pri...

NIMBYism also isnt something that would grow worse globally without an underlying driver.

That underlying driver is wealth inequality.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#448

Post by randomdata »

yareal wrote: post #438
randomdata wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The original poster is correct Seemingly not, else we'd have seen the math already. Also, 1. Not having savings (in the personal finance sense) does not mean one is living paycheque to paycheque. 2. The article you link to defines living paycheck to paycheck as a scenario where the family income does not cover expenses . Principal repayment is not an expense. Outside of the 1-2% with interest-only mortgages, anyone…

> Principal repayment is not an expense. In the links I posted several comments above, you'll find that it is considered an expense for the purposes of personal savings. I don't disagree with your definition, btw, it's just not the common one.

What are you referring to specifically? I only noticed one bit that suggested that a loan payment is an expense, but:

1. It does not make clear what the payment is. If it is only to pay the interest portion of the loan, there is little question that it is an expense. That would be outside of the topic of principal repayment, though.

2. If we assume there is a principal portion included in the payment, it is said only with respect to student loans. The product of a student loan retains no value – literally worthless the moment you drive it off the lot. As such, it is not unreasonable to consider the principal an expense. There truly is nothing left. A house, not so much. Unless the house has lost value (an atypical situation), you didn't give up anything.

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#449

Post by webninja »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #128
torpfactory wrote: post #53

I have a theory that one of the core problems is that American businesses just expect to make too much money. Everyone seems to be aiming for 30% gross margin or more, and then working to get monopoly power or regulatory capture in order to achieve that. When I work with businesses in China they sort of expect cutthroat competition and I'm sure they're not seeing 30% margins. Low a behold stuff is a lot cheaper there…

> I have a theory that one of the core problems is that American businesses just expect to make too much money. If you pay attention to certain board meetings, earnings calls, and so on, or if you had the opportunity to work for certain companies, you'll find people talking about the growth of growth, i.e. second order. It seems that the notion of sustainable growth is just gone. Corporations chasing lofty goals in a…

The stock of companies with low profit margins out performs the stock of companies with high profit margins. It’s not what you expect but it’s what you see unintuitively when you run the data. The proposed explanation is “Your margin is my opportunity.”

Re: Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us

#450

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

smsm42 wrote: post #157

I am wondering about the Autodesk example. If they suck so much and the users hate them so much, why no competition have arisen? Are there some government induced barriers? We saw Microsoft has been an unassailable incumbent on browser market, OS market, personal computing market, etc. And yet, their perceived monopoly has been successfully attacked. It took big companies like Google and Apple and IBM, but it turned…

Real alternatives that cover the same features and often even support the same file types are available for most Autodesk/Avid/Adobe products. Businesses, universities and individuals need to adopt a mindset of "we're willing to use anything that can perform the task at hand, and should explore all the options" as opposed to "we need what everyone says is the only tool for the job".
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