141–150 of 682 posts
I heard that one company buying all the product or a majority of the product is called a monopoly practice. If a dominant buyer locks up most of the supply chain through exclusive contracts, it prevents rival companies from getting the materials they need to survive, which violates laws like Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
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So not a single country out of ~200, not one, emulated the alleged great successes and utopias of historic non-capitalist economies for a century plus. Which is why you're unable to name one in the 20th century. Hmm I wonder why. Maybe we can look at societies where the modern era hasn't touched, like some places in Africa. Why is the quality of life so great there that everyone wants to move from hypercapitalistic s…
Wow, talk about moving the goal posts. I was pointing out that capitalism has not always been the universal economic system, and now you're trying to make me explain why years of exploitative colonialism and corrupt authoritarianism haven't yielded a better alternative. Well, isn't it obvious? 300 hundred years ago, every country in the world was ruled by an absolute monarch, and that fact alone was considered persua…
Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work. The productive people get tired of the product of their hard work being forcibly taken away and stop working since they would be given resources anyway. That's how the system collapses since there aren't enough resources for everyone to sit and consume. Thats exactly what happened in the eastern bloc. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
How many times should we run the same failed experiment and ruin millions more lives?
https://www.africadatahub.org/blog/what-usaid-funding-of-afr...
https://www.ft.com/content/c10e4f2f-5564-42a4-8aa7-66c78ca1c...
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/kathy-hoch...
Maybe if we're lucky we get more memory efficient software. ehh who am I kidding.
Last week I spent some extra time on a ticket in order to write a slight refactor that saves some RAM. If I had asked my boss for an extra day to implement this I would have been chastised for not delivering faster. Thankfully my colleagues saw the value in what I was doing. I smuggled the optimization into my PR with their approval. Anecdotal, but there are still people who care about efficiency out there. That bein…
I think that there is a way to change that.
If an application runs significantly better on lower end hardware while delivering the same results, the customers should prefer it. It is just a matter of promoting it that way.
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> > Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields. > No, that's thanks to commerce not to capitalism. Capitalism benefits those those who hold capital, which is not me. Are you toiling in the fields? It seems to me like your attitude is that "If I can't be rich, then no one should be rich." > The fact that there are more than enough resources for no one to live in poverty should suggest to you that somethi…
> It seems to me like your attitude is that "If I can't be rich, then no one should be rich." The problem with capitalism is not that some people get rich and some people don't. The problem is that of an unfair playing field. Everyone has a body and a mind, and commerce allows us to rent out those features in exchange for pay. People who are smarter or stronger or work harder or work more will be able to benefit more…
Risk : Reward, that's obvious, isn't it? I have known many relatives who bankrupted themselves trying to "own" stuff. I also know some who succeeded and are rich. Starting a business is very hard, try it.
I heard that one company buying all the product or a majority of the product is called a monopoly practice. If a dominant buyer locks up most of the supply chain through exclusive contracts, it prevents rival companies from getting the materials they need to survive, which violates laws like Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
It's called a monopsony[1], regardless, antitrust regulation is famously dead under the current US administration. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
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You think Chinese businesses aren’t in it for the profits?
While these private companies exist and are in it for the profits, they don't control the government, meaning any potential price gouging is strictly regulated. The Chinese government actively prevents private companies from becoming too powerful or dominating an industry in the public eye. Instead, they foster competition by promoting and building up alternative companies. A great example of this is how they handled…
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Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society. This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare th…
I own FAANG stock because I own the S&P 500 in my retirement accounts, and so do managed pension funds. There's a lot more than billionaires who benefit from FAANG shares going up in value.
China has an advantage here, once domestic DRAM production finally gets going. DRAM policy can be set strategically. China's economic planners may choose to provide DRAM to domestic manufacturers rather than export parts, even if exporting parts would be more profitable in the near term. That's already being done in raw materials. Conversely, if external suppliers have lower prices, there may be a policy decision to buy domestically to keep the domestic manufacturers going. Done with the goal of leveling production, this can work. Done stupidly, it becomes a money drain, of course.
Probably China controls the DRAM market around 2030 or so.
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And what happens if the market settles back down or the leading memory tech pivots away from what you invested all this capital and time chasing? You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.
Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society. This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare th…
The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.
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Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society. This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare th…
Society should care about people making profits because otherwise those people do something else instead of providing goods and services. What happened in Communism is instructive on this point. Now if you want to argue that the pursuit of maximum profit as an end is a problem, there's a case to be made. The US had something like a marginal tax rate of 90% around the 1940s/1950s, if I recall correctly, and it obvious…
Also Adam Smith implied that unbounded avarice is irrational and disruptive to society.
The assumption is that morality survives grotesque wealth accumulation, we see many examples proving otherwise