81–90 of 97 posts
Ahhh... he's trying to sell a book. Now the headline makes sense.
Are you familiar with the concept of a book review or is it always this confounding when the release of a thoughtful cultural artefact is responded to with discourse?
The Amazon case in this article seems to fall flat in the same way the Apple as Monopoly argument does. It works only if you ignore the fact of categorical choice (Android in the case of Apple). No seller is forced to sell on Amazon, as demonstrated by the thousands of Shopify and Etsy-hosted sellers out there. Yes, within the world of Amazon, Amazon sets the rules, but if the users leave, so will the sellers. Shopif…
> It works only if you ignore the fact of categorical choice (Android in the case of Apple) This is a good point because feudalism is when there is just one big fief. If another fief appears both cease to have the quality of feudalism, that’s what capitalism is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> uh, yes, he does. I clarify, I meant in the linked article; not an interview from years ago.
in the original article.... I quote: >Towards the end of Technofeudalism, Varoufakis canvasses some proposals, drawn from his earlier book Another Now (2020), for how to address these issues. These include ending the cloudalists faux “free service” model and replacing it with a universal micro-payment model, instituting a Bill of Digital Rights, and using digital technology to “democratise companies” (with decisions…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the right to own property, and to trade it without coercion Trade requires coercion. Without coercion to stop you taking a particular object, there would be no need to trade for it, you would simply take it. Without coercion to stop you living in your house if you stop paying rent or mortgage, why would you keep paying?
Ownership requires coercion. Threat of violence is used to defend property "rights." Trade requires ownership.
Who takes this guy seriously? He's been going from one rant to another over the years.
Do you similarly right off Nelson Mandela because he was ranting about the same injustice for multiple decades?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Walmart.com is another seller marketplace that does big volumes and works similarly to Amazon. Still, I think Amazon is doing some pretty anticompetitive things, and the FTC lawsuit against them seems like it has merit in my layperson’s eyes. Nobody else besides Amazon can get a random product to my door in under 12 hours for any reasonable cost. If I buy the product direct from the manufacturer I often get charged s…
> Nobody else besides Amazon can get a random product to my door in under 12 hours. If I buy the product direct from the manufacturer I often get charged shipping. That situation could be easily argued to be a monopoly. Why do Amazon have a monopoly on this? Is it because they are engaging in anti-competitive practices preventing competitors from offering the same thing or do they just have the best logistics experti…
You have to have Amazon’s sales volume before owning a delivery and logistics empire makes any financial sense, and you can’t provide Amazon’s level of service and low costs without owning your own global logistics company.
Then you’ve got the fact that Amazon’s technology infrastructure is a profit center. In contrast, any e-commerce competitor has to pay retail rates for cloud computing or run a data center as a cost center. Amazon e-commerce lost money for decades while AWS propped it up.
The anticompetitive practices come from the ways in which they exploit this enviable position, like the issue the FTC is suing them over where they are charging their merchants money to fight over search ranking, and knowingly promoting inferior and/or less relevant products with the result of raising prices for consumers and merchants artificially. Merchants can’t refuse to play the game because if you don’t sell on Amazon you lose most of the addressable customer base.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need a little more institutional oversight for the benefit of everyone else. But it seems government is in the clutches of big tech and special interest groups with big money. So I wont hold my breath on that.
I think it's too much oversight that allows these sort of behaviors. Too many moats that are too deep and too wide. If GIMP could ship with the Photoshop key map and have nigh 1:1 behaviors these things become commodities and thus must compete for distinguishment. As it stands Photoshop is there almost exclusively as a product of inertia and so Adobe can leave it to stagnate.
If you ask a business about their moats, they'll talk your ear off about network effects, two sided markets, last mile infrastructure, brand power, property portfolios, scale... and if you listen from the inside, you'll hear about dumping, bribery, buying out competitors, and leveraging existing monopolies into adjacent domains. Sure, once in a blue moon regulatory capture will slip onto that list as a minor player, but it's the clumsy scrawny kid on Team Anticompetition. It might deserve 10%, maaaaybe 20% of your trust-busting efforts -- but 100%? There are only two reasons to give it 100% of your attention: either you don't know the bigger, stronger, nastier members of the anti-competition team (implausible, if you've been in business for any period of time) or you have an ulterior motive. Since there's an obvious and massively profitable ulterior motive, I tend to believe in incentives over words on this one.
While regulatory capture is real and it's a problem and the solution is deregulation, I am mighty suspicious whenever I see this proposal alone rather than in a lineup of more traditional trust-busting strategies like Sherman Act litigation or tax policy, which tend to fall on the other side of the big/small govt debate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Walmart.com is another seller marketplace that does big volumes and works similarly to Amazon. Still, I think Amazon is doing some pretty anticompetitive things, and the FTC lawsuit against them seems like it has merit in my layperson’s eyes. Nobody else besides Amazon can get a random product to my door in under 12 hours for any reasonable cost. If I buy the product direct from the manufacturer I often get charged s…
Amazon built its own logistics network to improve its service and margins. I don't think they ought to be punished for it. To do so would be to deny economies of scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
in the original article.... I quote: >Towards the end of Technofeudalism, Varoufakis canvasses some proposals, drawn from his earlier book Another Now (2020), for how to address these issues. These include ending the cloudalists faux “free service” model and replacing it with a universal micro-payment model, instituting a Bill of Digital Rights, and using digital technology to “democratise companies” (with decisions…
When you talk of abolishing "private property" ownership that wasn't what I had in mind; instead, peoples' minds immediately jump to an image of a state-sanctioned jackbooted thug taking away my GameBoy... and I'm pretty confident Yannis isn't advocating for that.
> Approximately 80% of the income of traditional capitalist conglomerates go to salaries and wages, according to Varoufakis, while Big Tech’s workers, in contrast, collect “less than 1% of their firms’ revenues”. This doesn't sound right to me, but if it is Varoufakis has a point. Our contract, such as it is, with traditional capitalists is they employ many, produce some sort of value and keep as much profit as they…
He probably doesn't include stock compensation which is a huge part of compensation for workers in tech.