131–140 of 353 posts
Does anyone else think that nearly all huge companies exist due to monopolies or near-monopolies? MS has monopoly on desktops. Apple on cell phones and tablets. Facebook on social networking. Google on search. I think any market without at least 3-4 strong competitors will devolve into one dominant player who can milk more from the customer base.
Android has a higher market share than iOS. How does that make Apple a monopoly?
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> A market in which buyers are not free to choose better products is not a free market. Most businesses can choose better products (not sure about hospital industry). They can also choose to sign an agreement that makes a supplier relationship exclusive. For instance, a restaurant can sign an agreement to accept only Mastercard. Is this not a free market?
Yeah so the point is that if the only restaurant in the USA is Applebee's and they sign an exclusive agreement with Mastercard, they are extending their monopoly -- likely illegally in the US: "But exclusive dealing also can be anticompetitive in some circumstances. For example, exclusive dealing may allow one manufacturer, in effect, to monopolize efficient distribution services and thereby prevent its rivals from c…
Except that it isn't the only restaurant. You need a much better example.
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that's easy -- de-privatize the last mile access networks. run (copious strand count) fiber to everything, lease at standard pricing for every entrant, with operations & maintenance (and plant depreciation) built in. done.
I think the hardest thing about a municipal network like that is having a government organization competent in managing it. Streets are still mostly functional with potholes, but a network certainly isn't. We're operating on a brand new municipal network right now and it's not awesome. In an effort to be fair to all parties, no one is actually in charge. The network operator is separate from the construction contract…
Drive through many American small towns and it looks the exact same. A strip mall with a Subway, a couple national fast food joints, and if you're big enough, Wal-Mart. There are literally 1000s of towns with this copy and paste setup-- how could this not be detrimental when money is going to a huge corporation every time?
Object-oriented economy. Rather than reusing code, we reuse business plans!
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> What you need is a heavily regulated market that prevents exactly this behaviour. That seems like the opposite of a solution. For such a system to work one has to believe that that the regulatory apparatus is staffed with monks who are unaffected by the temptations of wealth, power and vanity that other humans are subject to and that 'regulatory capture' isn't a real thing. Further that the price mechanism as an in…
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Yes, regulations aren't perfect. Yes, regulatory capture is a problem. Neither of those things is a reason to not have regulations. >>that corrupting it with noise will have negligable effect on efficiency and technological development What really hurts efficiency and technological development is monopolies. A company that is a monopoly has very little reason to innovate. We se…
The author claims 6 seed companies are worse than hundreds of seed companies, but doesn't give a single fact to support that claim.
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> That's the thing though, that is exactly what a late stage "free market" looks like. How would you know? We haven't had anything approaching a free market since the early 20th century, even if we ignore government-granted monopolies via restricted land grants and patents.
How would you know? Just because it's never been truly tested in reality doesn't mean we can't stop and think about the situation. We know what corporations do when they are given a choice (they choose profits over anything else) and we know that consumers will choose low prices over everything else as well. So, it's not hard to draw the conclusion that this will result in consolidation, economies of scale, and event…
ISPs are a special case because regulations make it difficult or impossible for competitors to run cable. But economies of scale turned cars, PCs, consumer electronics, air travel, etc, from rich peoples play toys into affordable products for the masses. As consolidation hit all those industries their products merely got cheaper and in most cases, far better.
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Health care is squarely an economic/business issue that affects nearly everybody, and there are clear, meaningful differences between the two parties here.
AHCA, Obamacare is definitely better than before, it guarantees open access to many who didn't have it before. A good thing. But it didn't go far enough. It played in to the corporate healthcare system demands by not offering a competitive public option. The so called Blue Dog democrats blocked that, which is such a shame. Far better than anything the Republicans have put on the table. The problem is that we basicall…
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> That's the thing though, that is exactly what a late stage "free market" looks like. How would you know? We haven't had anything approaching a free market since the early 20th century, even if we ignore government-granted monopolies via restricted land grants and patents.
There were powerful monopolies in the late 19th and early 20th century like U.S. Steel and Standard Oil that the government broke up.
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Legally, I don't think so. But we did build a little Raspberry Pi based machine with a telegraph key. It needs some more work, but there are people who are legitimately wanting to buy the service.
There are people that want to buy telegraph service?