Monopolies are also bad for labor, last time I've checked.
Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
181–190 of 293 posts
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you break up alphabet?they will just move their corporation over seas, set up in africa and avoid any monopoly breakers. The government has no power over these companies. They would have to raid the offices and send the ceo to prison before alphabet agrees to break their monopoly.
Structural separation: you can't run a search engine and at the same time services that are the subject of it. For Amazon, you can't run the marketplace and at the same time sell own-brand (AmazonBasics) products. For Apple you can't run the app store and also sell apps. It's in Warren's program, although of course the devil is in the details. Lina Khan is the thought leader on these issues (I am sure there are other…
This is a completely destructive plan that will enable international competitors who aren’t subject to it to simply take the tech industry away from the US.
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not quite sure that smaller companies can offer higher wages. Also, keep in mind a story of Bell Labs - the innovation power house hugely responsible for tens of Nobel Prize winning inventions such as transistor and solar cells. You need an insanely rich and powerful parent company to fund something like this (only Alphabet is kind pf doing it these days)
"You need an insanely rich and powerful parent company to fund something like this" Or the US government, which funds the overwhelming majority of basic research in the world.
There's a sense in which both systems tax ordinary folk to pay for science.
In the Bell Labs system, the tax is the monopoly price paid by folks on their phone bill. In the other system the taxes are collected by the government.
There's a lot of money to be made migrating such taxes to the private sector where private individuals can take a cut.
This is one of the reasons it's often profitable to campaign against things like the public funding of science (e.g. the recent attacks on the NSF).
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#184Wasn't too surprised to see that Bloomberg neglected to mention a pretty self evident reason why tech workers might want that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... I'm pretty sure that if the anti-trust litigation in 2001 hadn't battered microsoft then tech wages would not be as high today. Competition among employers is good for wages, and the fewer and bigger the employers, the less the co…
The Seattle Times estimated in the 1990s that Microsoft created 10,000+ millionaire employees in the city. This was before the anti-trust litigation.
In fact, most everyone I knew that worked for Microsoft in the 1990s became a millionaire.
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Say you write some code that increases conversions by 0.01%. Thats worth 10 bucks to momandpop.com compared with millions to Amazon. No wonder that programmers can make more at Amazon.
Analogy doesn't really hold up. Increasing conversions by 0.01% probably takes an hour at momandpop.com and maybe a year or more at Amazon. Not to mention low-hanging fruit already being picked at large corps.
I think you've proved my point. Working for momandpop.com produces value at $10 an hour. Working for Amazon and assuming 2000 working hours in a year produces value at $500 an hour. And that's if that 0.01% improvement is worth only one million dollars.
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a difference between big companies and monopolies. Big companies will likely always be the ones offering the highest salaries and they'll always exist. Once they monopolize the labor market though: they'll no longer have a need to offer those wages as high (even if they're the highest within the market).
How do you break up alphabet?they will just move their corporation over seas, set up in africa and avoid any monopoly breakers. The government has no power over these companies. They would have to raid the offices and send the ceo to prison before alphabet agrees to break their monopoly.
Moving jurisdictions isn't a magic spell that grants protection. As long as a company is deriving value from something in a jurisdiction, then the government of that jurisdiction has power over that value because they can physically control it.
Companies have outsized power these days imo, but they still aren't at the point to compete with the United States military and resist the actual violence that be visited on their assets if they do not comply
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#187Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#188This is only surprising if you subscribe strictly to Sinclair's quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." In reality, many many people work at jobs that they don't believe in. I personally haven't been able to hack it - I'm too stubborn to keep my mouth shut at appropriate times. But ultimately, people can and will vote against "their own self…
> I vote for and fund environmental parties, despite that meaning I will personally lose out in a lot of ways, because it's the right thing to do.
The "catch" there is that since your vote won't actually change any election, this end up costing you nothing.
This is how economists analyze it. Not meant as a critique of you in any way.
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#189It is odd that so many otherwise tech savvy people are supportive of 20th century solutions to 21st century problems (to borrow Andrew Yang's phrase).
People don't want to use the 4th best search engine or twitter or airbnb. We all know this. These kind of things are naturally winner take all and will pop up elsewhere on the global stage if we push them down here.
Instead, apply a VAT. This would be a productive and holistic solution to a 21st century problem.
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#190I wonder what the support is after Warren revealed her tax plans? I would think that increasing the capital gains taxes and requiring taxes on stock appreciation regardless of they are sold would affect Silicon Valley workers who often have a large part of their competition as stocks/equity.
I'd expect to see a lot of foreign investors pull their money out of the US and invest elsewhere.