301–310 of 383 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do wonder how many people that criticize the renaming, were criticizing Obama when he rename Mt McKinley. What are the principles here? Or is it just names I like vs names I don't like.
The principal is it's OK if a democrat does it. For example: It's OK to rename something named after a Republican president who was shot (Mt Mckinley). It's not OK to rename or change something about a Democratic president who was shot (ie. The Kennedy Center).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true, I'd go much further than the OP here and say the barrier for merger should be MUCH higher than the barrier for spin-out or split. There's no shortage of obvious problems that can arise from concentration of influence and control over a market. So just try to prevent it. Trade some max efficiency for redundancy + anti-corruption/pro-competition/pro-consumer market forces.
100% we do not need one company that makes everything hi there Samsung.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self-driving cars are an absurdly inefficient way to reduce traffic deaths that exists only because it makes substantially more money for shareholders than the alternatives. You are being witheld a good and cheap solution now for the promise of a worse and expensive solution some time in the future. All the while people keep dying. Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving i…
* a good and cheap solution * You mean public transport? I live in a country with one of the best public transport systems in the world. I enjoy it, but please don't fool yourself into thinking that it is cheap. It is not, very much NOT. All the big Czech cities spend between 25 and 35 per cent of their municipal budgets on public transport, and those are mostly already mature systems where the most expensive work li…
Or a bunch of robotaxis, which reduce the up-front cost and amount of parking needed, but the operational and infrastructure costs remain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say google is still in its growth phase, albeit a slower one. Especially with capex spending etc.
Google is the new IBM. All the signs are there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A progressive tax on the size of the company can do this.
Don’t we have enough taxes? Taxes should fund government not be used to force people to do things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hot take? But I think antitrust trials should not he subject to settlement. It only proves to reinforce the accusations when a company is big enough to pay off the government.
...then how do you maintain an adversarial proceeding? Like, it's a pretty basic part of American law that courts only hear "cases and controversies" - that is to say, you need to have two parties who disagree before judges are allowed to do anything. If both parties no longer disagree, a settlement is how they call the lawsuit off. But if they're not allowed to settle... what happens? Are we going to force both part…
As someone who's been in court quite a lot, personally involved, in the cases, etc, I can guarantee you that legislation fixes this. Just about your entire argument falls apart if legislation enforcing a spirit of "Antitrust against a party can only be settled by a division of the the party".
You wanna settle? Sure, but it means you gotta divide in a way that we agree to . You're claiming you're not guilty of antitrust? Okay, lets take it before a court.
This way there will never be a "settlement" whereby the monopolist gets to pay a cost of doing business and then continue doing business in the same way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is the new IBM. All the signs are there.
IBM is more than 100 years old, has defined a huge part of how we think about computers, made plenty of its employees and workers of the wider field rich, has sold many businesses it considered distracting, and is still worth $200B+. Anyone saying "IBM" in the sense of "stagnant failure" is delusional.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true, I'd go much further than the OP here and say the barrier for merger should be MUCH higher than the barrier for spin-out or split. There's no shortage of obvious problems that can arise from concentration of influence and control over a market. So just try to prevent it. Trade some max efficiency for redundancy + anti-corruption/pro-competition/pro-consumer market forces.
The real benefit of a merged company is that where the two original companies were competing in the same market, it would be illegal for them to collude to set the same prices as eachother. However, when merged, they can do exactly that - which allows them to extract more profits. Rather than denying mergers, I suggest merged companies have an extra sales tax for ever on all goods they sell where they used to be comp…
1) make monopolies legal
2) set a floor for the monopoly tax (whilst excessive company profits are bad, obviously companies MUST make a profit, and hence whatever this governor sets as extra tax must be added to the costs for customers. Profit = good (even if you are a communist), only excessive profits or profiteering are bad. Otherwise, after a short while, no more company, no more goods, no more service. No exceptions, not even under different systems. Or in other words: communist companies must make profits too, and just ask some older Russians, even if that means making a profit at the expense of employees)
This seems to me like it would be by far the worst of all worlds. This would mean lots of monopolies, with the specific purpose of making life more expensive.