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Author Topic: These FIVE men control your freedom  (Read 15859 times)

jhkim

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #60 on: January 15, 2021, 11:30:23 PM »
My understanding of the Trump ban ruling was that it was based on him using his Twitter channel to issue important information as the President of the United States.

It doesn't affect how Twitter is used in general by private citizens. At most, it could affect how other public officials use other private businesses for official communications.

So then stopping the President of the United States from issuing important information like, for example, going home from the Capitol peacefully seems to be illegal.

The ruling was against the President, over how he should behave when acting as a public official - not about how Twitter or anyone else should behave as a private company.

For example, when Biden becomes President - then he could choose to appear on Fox News if Fox News agrees. They would agree to terms of his address. But he can't just demand that Fox News play his address and it would be illegal for them to refuse. That would be a huge authoritarian overreach, in my opinion.

oggsmash

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #61 on: January 15, 2021, 11:32:45 PM »
     Private company.  With more money and power than most nations and beholden only to themselves, and will gleefully operate in any interest or other nation's interest that makes them a dime.  They avoid taxes like the plague, do all they can to capitulate to china and its outright tyrant government, and use their product to engage in social engineering endlessly.  They also seem to act as a unified front on many issues and with several actions.  Given they have top end executives openly  weeping en masse on camera and swear to sway the next election, I think something else may be afoot. I am sure it will all turn out alright.

   

jhkim

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #62 on: January 15, 2021, 11:50:20 PM »
     Private company.  With more money and power than most nations and beholden only to themselves, and will gleefully operate in any interest or other nation's interest that makes them a dime.  They avoid taxes like the plague, do all they can to capitulate to china and its outright tyrant government, and use their product to engage in social engineering endlessly.  They also seem to act as a unified front on many issues and with several actions.  Given they have top end executives openly  weeping en masse on camera and swear to sway the next election, I think something else may be afoot. I am sure it will all turn out alright.

I dislike the social media companies too -- but I think nationalizing them and making them public utilities wouldn't be any better - and I doubt most conservatives would approve of that anyway, particularly under a Biden administration.

I do support changing the regulations they work under, and possibly taxing them more (given how much they dodge taxes as you say).

oggsmash

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #63 on: January 16, 2021, 12:07:48 AM »
     Private company.  With more money and power than most nations and beholden only to themselves, and will gleefully operate in any interest or other nation's interest that makes them a dime.  They avoid taxes like the plague, do all they can to capitulate to china and its outright tyrant government, and use their product to engage in social engineering endlessly.  They also seem to act as a unified front on many issues and with several actions.  Given they have top end executives openly  weeping en masse on camera and swear to sway the next election, I think something else may be afoot. I am sure it will all turn out alright.

I dislike the social media companies too -- but I think nationalizing them and making them public utilities wouldn't be any better - and I doubt most conservatives would approve of that anyway, particularly under a Biden administration.

I do support changing the regulations they work under, and possibly taxing them more (given how much they dodge taxes as you say).
  Giving the government the power that private industry abuses now seems like a very bad idea.   I think you are living in a fantasy if you think they will pay a cent more in taxes.  They write the tax policy.  Those mofos will tell Biden what to do, and he will do it.  Just as they will do the same to 90 percent plus of the rest of elected officials.  At this point the best bet would to be hoping the heir is not malevolent at heart.  I do not think they are, but they are extremely powerful, and in the end a whole lot of power and being human generally do not go well together.
  As I get older, I look back and I see some things that influenced me and others and ideas and so forth that had net positive or negative effects on people and their lives.  The only people social media has affected positively are the people who own it/work at the high end for it, or who have managed to find a niche selling things through it.   It is a cancer to society and one of the active ingredients in what will be a fall of the empire.   At this point though, it might as well be a comet we just spotted about to collide with the planet.  It will be what it will be.
« Last Edit: January 16, 2021, 12:11:02 AM by oggsmash »

deathknight4044

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #64 on: January 16, 2021, 12:31:07 AM »
Monopolies good

EOTB

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #65 on: January 16, 2021, 12:36:05 AM »
we’re a ways past the threshold of the Standard Oil precedent with big tech.  It won’t be a betrayal of the principle of private property to enforce changes in structure, behavior, and ownership.

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moonsweeper

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #66 on: January 16, 2021, 01:10:37 AM »
Monopolies good

Yeah.  I'm waiting for them to shut Tim down...
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Shasarak

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #67 on: January 16, 2021, 01:23:20 AM »
My understanding of the Trump ban ruling was that it was based on him using his Twitter channel to issue important information as the President of the United States.

It doesn't affect how Twitter is used in general by private citizens. At most, it could affect how other public officials use other private businesses for official communications.

So then stopping the President of the United States from issuing important information like, for example, going home from the Capitol peacefully seems to be illegal.

The ruling was against the President, over how he should behave when acting as a public official - not about how Twitter or anyone else should behave as a private company.

For example, when Biden becomes President - then he could choose to appear on Fox News if Fox News agrees. They would agree to terms of his address. But he can't just demand that Fox News play his address and it would be illegal for them to refuse. That would be a huge authoritarian overreach, in my opinion.

Correct me if I am wrong because I always thought that the Potus does have the power to appear on all Tv stations (and radio?) if he wants to make some kind of announcement irregardless of their opinion.
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jhkim

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #68 on: January 16, 2021, 02:43:59 AM »
Correct me if I am wrong because I always thought that the Potus does have the power to appear on all Tv stations (and radio?) if he wants to make some kind of announcement irregardless of their opinion.

As far as I know, it's only because the networks usually want to cooperate with the President, and they have a general duty to the FCC to do some public good - like children's educational programming. Here's what I found on howitworks:

Quote
Networks rarely refuse presidential requests, but it does happen and may even be increasingly common. In 2009 for example, Fox declined to show one of Barack Obama's news conference during primetime, citing that the network would lose too much money in lost advertising revenue. In 2001, the network made the same decision for one of George W. Bush's speeches, despite the White House's request. In 2014, ABC, NBC and CBS all declined to air Obama's November 2014 speech on immigration reform, though none would comment on why.
Source: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/major-networks-carry-presidential-addresses.htm

EOTB

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #69 on: January 16, 2021, 03:03:06 AM »
But a president can order them under the emergency broadcast system and they must broadcast if so ordered.  In the end, they don’t have a choice because the frequencies are granted to them; they are not private.
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jhkim

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #70 on: January 16, 2021, 03:10:26 AM »
As I get older, I look back and I see some things that influenced me and others and ideas and so forth that had net positive or negative effects on people and their lives.  The only people social media has affected positively are the people who own it/work at the high end for it, or who have managed to find a niche selling things through it.   It is a cancer to society and one of the active ingredients in what will be a fall of the empire.   At this point though, it might as well be a comet we just spotted about to collide with the planet.  It will be what it will be.

I don't know about the fall of an empire -- but I agree that social media is destructive. It's making everyone into media junkies, constantly hyped up on outrage at the latest terrible thing, especially that the other side has done. Everyone is now convinced that the world is always getting worse, usually in contradictory ways ("Marxism will destroy the world!" "No, global warming will destroy the world!"). While many things have gotten better - like crime and homelessness -- depression, overdoses, and suicide have gone up.

Television turned people into pacified zombies and couch potatoes, but social media turns them into active participants in their own destruction.

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #71 on: January 16, 2021, 09:11:15 AM »
we’re a ways past the threshold of the Standard Oil precedent with big tech.  It won’t be a betrayal of the principle of private property to enforce changes in structure, behavior, and ownership.
The Standard Oil precedent, and thus the entire edifice of US anti-trust policy, is based on a lie which was exposed more than 60 years ago. Recommended reading for anyone interested in anti-trust or monopolies:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~twod/oil-ns/articles/research-oil/research-oil/john_mcgee_predatory_pricing_standard_oil1958.pdf

Monopolies don't really exist in the wilds of a true free market. Undercutting the prices of your competitors means you lose money, and even if you drive them out of business, that just means their assets are available at fire sale prices for the next competitor, making it even cheaper for them. The only reason monopolies exist is because a compliant government puts up barriers to hinder new competitors. (The only exception might be DeBeers.)

A classic example is Amazon and sales tax. For years, Amazon resisted paying sales tax, because it gave them an advantage against brick and mortar retailers. But as they became huge, the number of online competitors with similar advantages increased, that flipped. Since they had a physical presence and thus had to pay taxes already in more states, forcing all their online competitors to also pay taxes in those states gave them a relative advantage. And since they were big, the overhead of working out how to pay tax in each of the 10,000 or so local tax codes in the US was relatively cheap for them, and expensive for their smaller competitors. So they dropped their resistance and supported online tax laws, which were quickly passed due to compliant legislatures. This happens in big and small ways all over, with regulations and laws nearly always favoring large and established companies over their new and smaller competitors. That is how real monopolies are created and sustained. Unlike Standard Oil, Big Tech is a real, or state-supported, monopoly.

Arkansan

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #72 on: January 16, 2021, 11:30:17 AM »
we’re a ways past the threshold of the Standard Oil precedent with big tech.  It won’t be a betrayal of the principle of private property to enforce changes in structure, behavior, and ownership.
The Standard Oil precedent, and thus the entire edifice of US anti-trust policy, is based on a lie which was exposed more than 60 years ago. Recommended reading for anyone interested in anti-trust or monopolies:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~twod/oil-ns/articles/research-oil/research-oil/john_mcgee_predatory_pricing_standard_oil1958.pdf

Monopolies don't really exist in the wilds of a true free market. Undercutting the prices of your competitors means you lose money, and even if you drive them out of business, that just means their assets are available at fire sale prices for the next competitor, making it even cheaper for them. The only reason monopolies exist is because a compliant government puts up barriers to hinder new competitors. (The only exception might be DeBeers.)

A classic example is Amazon and sales tax. For years, Amazon resisted paying sales tax, because it gave them an advantage against brick and mortar retailers. But as they became huge, the number of online competitors with similar advantages increased, that flipped. Since they had a physical presence and thus had to pay taxes already in more states, forcing all their online competitors to also pay taxes in those states gave them a relative advantage. And since they were big, the overhead of working out how to pay tax in each of the 10,000 or so local tax codes in the US was relatively cheap for them, and expensive for their smaller competitors. So they dropped their resistance and supported online tax laws, which were quickly passed due to compliant legislatures. This happens in big and small ways all over, with regulations and laws nearly always favoring large and established companies over their new and smaller competitors. That is how real monopolies are created and sustained. Unlike Standard Oil, Big Tech is a real, or state-supported, monopoly.

Just a cursory read of the paper you linked shows it doesn't support your position that monopolies can't exist in the "wilds of a free market", hell a handful of paragraphs in and the author explains a process by which just such a thing can happen without undercutting taking place at all.

The author of this paper then makes a few related critical errors in my opinion. He assumes that "Anything above the competitive value of their firms should be enough to buy them" when asserting a hypothetical in which a potential monopoly or pre-existing monopoly is looking to eliminate localized competition. This is a specious assumption that requires a sort of mechanistic rote logic decision making by the holders of a firm being targeted by a larger one, it ignores the fact that people are rarely if ever perfectly rational and many do in fact form emotional attachments to their holdings that are above the simple market value.

The author again goes on to make the assumption that a monopolistic firm simply wouldn't be willing to eat the costs associated with under cutting when the option of a flat buyout is hypothetically on the table. Again this requires some sort of perfect logic machine to be making decisions. Worse still it ignores the possibility of a long term stratagem in which the potential monopoly is willing to eat the steep short term losses which while possibly steeper than the cost of a buyout could reap long term benefits in the form of a multitude of elements including direct revenue, influence on secondary and tertiary industries, etc that would make the cost benefit analysis make sense.

That paper is shit. He makes an number of "just so" "logical" assumptions to set and justify his premises that are not at all apparent. All manner of scenarios could be conceived that would dismiss each of his necessary clauses, and most of them requiring far fewer assumptions.
« Last Edit: January 16, 2021, 11:32:50 AM by Arkansan »

Pat
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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #73 on: January 16, 2021, 01:15:00 PM »
we’re a ways past the threshold of the Standard Oil precedent with big tech.  It won’t be a betrayal of the principle of private property to enforce changes in structure, behavior, and ownership.
The Standard Oil precedent, and thus the entire edifice of US anti-trust policy, is based on a lie which was exposed more than 60 years ago. Recommended reading for anyone interested in anti-trust or monopolies:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~twod/oil-ns/articles/research-oil/research-oil/john_mcgee_predatory_pricing_standard_oil1958.pdf

Monopolies don't really exist in the wilds of a true free market. Undercutting the prices of your competitors means you lose money, and even if you drive them out of business, that just means their assets are available at fire sale prices for the next competitor, making it even cheaper for them. The only reason monopolies exist is because a compliant government puts up barriers to hinder new competitors. (The only exception might be DeBeers.)

A classic example is Amazon and sales tax. For years, Amazon resisted paying sales tax, because it gave them an advantage against brick and mortar retailers. But as they became huge, the number of online competitors with similar advantages increased, that flipped. Since they had a physical presence and thus had to pay taxes already in more states, forcing all their online competitors to also pay taxes in those states gave them a relative advantage. And since they were big, the overhead of working out how to pay tax in each of the 10,000 or so local tax codes in the US was relatively cheap for them, and expensive for their smaller competitors. So they dropped their resistance and supported online tax laws, which were quickly passed due to compliant legislatures. This happens in big and small ways all over, with regulations and laws nearly always favoring large and established companies over their new and smaller competitors. That is how real monopolies are created and sustained. Unlike Standard Oil, Big Tech is a real, or state-supported, monopoly.

Just a cursory read of the paper you linked shows it doesn't support your position that monopolies can't exist in the "wilds of a free market", hell a handful of paragraphs in and the author explains a process by which just such a thing can happen without undercutting taking place at all.

The author of this paper then makes a few related critical errors in my opinion. He assumes that "Anything above the competitive value of their firms should be enough to buy them" when asserting a hypothetical in which a potential monopoly or pre-existing monopoly is looking to eliminate localized competition. This is a specious assumption that requires a sort of mechanistic rote logic decision making by the holders of a firm being targeted by a larger one, it ignores the fact that people are rarely if ever perfectly rational and many do in fact form emotional attachments to their holdings that are above the simple market value.

The author again goes on to make the assumption that a monopolistic firm simply wouldn't be willing to eat the costs associated with under cutting when the option of a flat buyout is hypothetically on the table. Again this requires some sort of perfect logic machine to be making decisions. Worse still it ignores the possibility of a long term stratagem in which the potential monopoly is willing to eat the steep short term losses which while possibly steeper than the cost of a buyout could reap long term benefits in the form of a multitude of elements including direct revenue, influence on secondary and tertiary industries, etc that would make the cost benefit analysis make sense.

That paper is shit. He makes an number of "just so" "logical" assumptions to set and justify his premises that are not at all apparent. All manner of scenarios could be conceived that would dismiss each of his necessary clauses, and most of them requiring far fewer assumptions.
The citation was to back up my claim about Standard Oil. That's why it's specifically under that paragraph, and not at the end. The paper illustrates that the basis for the Standard Oil decision, and the ensuing legacy of anti-trust actions, is based on a lie. Standard Oil was not a monopoly, it had many competitors, and those competitors were increasing not diminishing in power. It also debunks predatory pricing. Most of the rationale behind anti-trust regulation was based on a single author, who had no direct expertise on the subject, but who had an axe to grind because her immediate relatives failed to compete successfully with SO.

The paper I cited is highly regarded among economists, and none of your criticisms touch on the heart of the matter. Economic theory requires simplifying complex behavior. This can sometimes be an oversimplification, or miss essential elements, but if you want to point out the flaws in a theory, you need to demonstrate that those simplifications make the conclusions incorrect, you can't simply point out that it doesn't account for every possible variable. That would invalidate every theory in economics, and in most other fields as well.

For instance, it's true that some people will hold to their businesses, even when they're given an offer well above market value. But most will sell. Both because it provides a greater financial reward, and because people who make poor economic decisions will tend to fail out the marketplace, and thus are less likely to own businesses. This is why it's a useful assumption. There are certainly some valid criticisms based on "Homo economicus", but most are based on the same fallacious logic you're making: Economists don't assume that all people are always rational. But people are frequently rational, and rationality is predictable. Conversely, people who behave for reasons beyond purely rational economic trade offs tend to do so for multifarious reasons. So if 90%, or 60%, or even 30% of people behave in an economically rational way, then we can draw conclusions based on that because it creates a clear trend among the otherwise more random data. The same problem applies to your argument about eating costs. Since you appear to like citations for everything, the first chapter of David Friedman's Hidden Order covers this fundamental basis of economics in a very readable form.

Your long term stratagem argument doesn't undercut anything, either. The problem with eating steep losses is it only makes sense if you can increases your revenue in other areas. For instance, by ending up in a theoretical monopoly position where you can dictate prices. If that can't work, it's just a loss. To prove your point, you'd need to show how a company can use alternatives to a buy out to gain an advantage that outweighs the losses.

If you want a source for why monopolies can't survive in the wild, it's addressed in Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics. I could also point you at Mises, but that's heavier reading.

EOTB

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Re: These FIVE men control your freedom
« Reply #74 on: January 16, 2021, 01:18:48 PM »
Whether the paper is correct or whether the claimed reasons for taking action against Standard Oil didn’t exist at the time are both irrelevant to whether a valid, actionable scenario exists now to be addressed

A big part of why the other side makes hard gains in the culture war is they take action, as opposed to using the present circumstances as an opportunity to debate the minutia of theory for theory acceptance.  They eat a meal when food is available, instead of debating the platonic meal, or the best restaurant to eat their next meal at.  Think tanks are where those who wish to debate what action should look like are willingly diverted from any possibility of acting.
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