291–300 of 476 posts
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I often hear people complain about others making money in the stock market, so I suggest they invest in stocks, too. They respond saying it's too risky.
I thought index funds have become the mainstream investment vehicle of the last ten years.
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> Since older firms, tend to be larger, slower growing, and less competitive, it's not wonder we've seen an increase in monopolization. This is self-contradictory.
Not if you consider that older larger firms can use their position to artificially suppress competition.
This is why the solution of making the government ever more powerful isn't going to work.
In almost all USA industries, there is increasing amount of consolidation. The top 4 companies' in almost any industry has a larger share of the total market: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-... Some consolidation is natural, but a huge part is caused by mergers and acquisitions (M&A) fulled by Private Equity. The M&A benefits the shareholders of participating companies at the expense of c…
Monopolization almost certainly is occurring. The left usually cites weak antitrust enforcement. The right usually cites regulatory barriers that make it expensive to compete without economies of scale. I actually think both sides are at least partially correct. However what almost everyone overlooks is the demographic transition. The US, along with every other developed economy, is significantly older today than it…
I find it very disappointing that the most reliably lucrative career arc for a programmer nowadays is to get hired by a tech giant and stay there as long as possible. And the second most is probably to go to work for a company that could get gobbled up by a tech giant. I've made a career out of small startups, and I wouldn't trade it for a thing. On the other hand, if I'd gone to work for Amazon straight out of colle…
And what kills me about this is it almost seems like the big tech companies are just grabbing up engineers to no purpose. When I hear stories about what people are actually doing at larger companies, it often seems somewhere between miniscule and just plain empty. And it's not like a lot of the people telling these stories don't understand that. But they're happy enough wasting a third of their day at that salary.
Fear controls populations, and protects power.
We need to start taking decentralization far more seriously than we have been.
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Another metaphor: "Linux is open and free, it can be a major desktop OS if everyone just switched to it, but because they haven't they obviously don't care for it."
Not to go off on a tangent but what you said is true, most people don't care about Linux...or Windows, or MacOS. They have a general apathy to whatever desktop OS they use, with a slight bias to whatever they used last. People just want to use the applications they want and need. Perhaps the same statement would apply to workplace control. Most people have a general apathy to their workplace governance and only care…
There's also situations where dominant players make it difficult for smaller competitors to survive. In a loose analogy, Microsoft's monopolistic strategies in the '90s can be compared to the past decades' weakening of laws protecting unions.
Strengthening unions, or rather reversing the weakening of unions in this country, doesn't really require oppressive government force. That's in line with the misconception that considers America's sickly unions- who are an absolute paper tiger at this point in history- to have any considerable strength.
https://psmag.com/economics/what-caused-the-decline-of-union...
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Was not the case for most careers out there? If you want a comfortable 9-5 job you generally join a giant and stay as long as possible.
that's not what he's saying. He's saying higher overall income, and it comes with lower risk than startups.
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This is an argument a lot of non-authoritarian socialists make: democracy only governs the few hours when people are not sleeping or at work, so a deeper, fuller democracy would include running workplaces democratically as well. Whether by employee-elected boards, cooperatives, democratically run unions (a necessary distinction), or some other form of collective control, that the consent of the governed is a question…
Democracy is not an efficient way of running a business. Look at the multi-trillion dollar deficit as an example. Workers are incentivized to choose themselves over the health of the company or the customer. Also, people overwhelmingly would rather exchange their stake in the company for the equivalent value in cash. It's only when the company's valuation skyrockets when they retroactively declare this to be unfair.
And maybe that is how it should be? Maybe life shouldn't be about the most efficient way to run a business.
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Not if you consider that older larger firms can use their position to artificially suppress competition.
The government is the tool used to suppress competition. This is why the solution of making the government ever more powerful isn't going to work.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/04/snap-ceo-isnt-expecting-mu...
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Why do we want to prevent people from doing that?
Because it defeats the purpose of a progressive capital gains tax? If the concern is that someone is paying less in tax off $250,000 in capital gains when they realize their wealth than someone who is paid a wage of $250,000, the policy prescription (with which I agree), is to tax $250,000 capital gains like income, I.e. at the top marginal tax rate. What happens if I liquidate $50,000 at a time over the course of 5…
This could mean that they have $1 million of unrealized gains that year. You're not really able to tax unrealized gains most of the time because they could disappear or go negative. That would go untaxed until they sell, but it would eventually be taxed.
At the same time, they're not going to be able to enjoy their wealth only taking out a small amount every year, so I'm not entirely convinced that this behavior of living frugally to pay less tax is something we need to 'prevent'.