wrote in message
...
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 05:40:48 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 12:19:58 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 15:36:47 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:



wrote in message
.. .
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 07:33:23 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:



wrote in message
...
On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 06:23:47 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Thursday, February 7, 2019 at 7:09:47 PM UTC-5,
wrote:
On Thu, 7 Feb 2019 15:09:46 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Thursday, February 7, 2019 at 5:20:53 PM UTC-5, Oren wrote:
On Thu, 07 Feb 2019 16:45:58 -0500, wrote:

On Thu, 7 Feb 2019 16:15:36 -0500, Ed Pawlowski

wrote:

On 2/7/2019 2:35 PM, George wrote:
Socialist Ocasio-Kotex makes Al Gore proud!

https://www.marke****ch.com/story/pe...eam-2019-02-07



I like this comment. Should be simple if you want to live
in the
dark

Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Markey are aiming to
eliminate
the
U.S. carbon footprint by 2030.

This is how dumb AOC is.
The Green New Deal would be paid for €œthe same way we paid
for
the
original New Deal, World War II, the bank bailouts, tax cuts
for
the
rich and decades of war €” with public money appropriated by
Congress,€�
Ocasio-Cortez said.

We can't even raise the taxes to pay the government's bills
now.
We
are borrowing close to a trillion a year. Let's see how it
works
for
the democrats if they want to raise taxes enough to pay for
the
"Green
Deal".

We are all going to drown in debt long before sea level rise
gets
anyone

Her mother should have taught her: "money doesn't grow on
trees".

She doesn't think it grows on trees. She says it's in the hands
of
the
rich and she wants to redistribute it.

The problem is that people overestimate how much money the rich
have
compared to a $20 trillion dollar debt or even the trillion
dollar
annual deficit. A huge part of the problem is people think
unrealized
capital gains are wealth.

And another problem is that people like her claim that it's unfair
that
the founder of a company is worth a billion, while the lowest
employees
are only making $30K. It would be nice if those making $30K were
making
$40K or $50K instead. The problem is that the govt taking the rich
guy's
billion, running it into the govt coffers, then ****ing it away on
moon
beams or people who just don't want to work, doesn't get those
workers
a $50K salary either. A good, thriving economy with low
unemployment is
a better way of raising their salaries. I'd be willing to at least
look
at other ideas to try to raise earnings overall, but taking all the
money
of the rich, stuffing it into govt and silly socialist ideas, just
produces another Venezuela.


The money some CEOs make is the symptom of a much larger problem.
There are far fewer companies controlling far larger portions of
the
marketplace. Perhaps a better measure of CEO pay would be the
company
gross and market share.
People who control monopolies tend to make a lot of money. We
haven't
really tried to do anything about monopolies since the Nixon
administration.

There are no current monopolys, just some very successful operations.

Bull****.

We'll see...

I would start with the drug companies

By definition, if there is more than one, it isnt a monopoly.

There are monopolies in whole classes of drugs. If you need a
particular drug to survive and only one company can sell it, he can
charge what ever he wants.

Segue from allegation of "whole classes", to an individual drug, noted.
That a given company has a sole sourced product does not make that
company or even that product a monopoly. For the vast majority of
drugs, there are competitors and alternate drugs.



"Your money or your life".
There is also collusion and price fixing among companies that are
supposed to be competing with each other.

If you have proof of that, contact the DOJ, I'm sure they will be
very interested.

No they aren't The DoJ hasn't pursued an anti trust case successfully
since the lie sure suit fell out of fashion.




but in the US most cable TV companies are monopolies in their areas

But only in their area, not the entire country.

So what? If you live. there it is still a monopoly and unlike what
Trader says, there is virtually any regulation of these monopolies.

and Comcast is a monster owning entertainment from
the studio to the set top box and everything in between.

Still not a monopoly given that you are free to stream off the net etc.

If the cable company is also the only real net provider, you are still
stuck.

Microsoft is also a monopoly by the definition used when
the broke up the phone company and IBM in the 70s.

IBM never had a monopoly
The US department of justice had a different opinion, both in 1956
when they were initially throttled and again 1968 when the DOJ filed
another suit.

And then the DOJ dropped the case.

Because IBM had already done everything they sought in the case
It was broken up into several individual operating units actively
competing with each other.

and neither did Microsoft.
Yes they did if you used the same guideline the DoJ used in the 50s
and 60s. (based on market share alone)

I would agree with that assessment. MSFT certainly has market power
at least as great as what IBM had in the 70s.





Innovation exploded when that happened.

Irrelevant to whether it had a monopoly or not. It didnt.
When the phone company had a monopoly, there was virtually any
innovation.
Without unbundling the phone lines there would have never been a
consumer grade modem and no internet for one thing.
When the telco had a monopoly you couldn't even buy a telephone. you
had to rent it from them. It was illegal to hook up your own even if
you could buy one.
Once the phone system was unbundled prices plunged too.
I pay less now in 2019 dollars for a land line than I did in 1975
dollars then. My bill was typically $35 in 75 depending on how many
distance calls I made. That is about $135 in 2019 dollars
My bill now is less than $30 for my landline with free long distance.


Agree with the above too. AT&T had a total lock on the whole thing,
end to end. It's the best example of a real monopoly and what happens.
But there definitely was innovation at AT&T. They excelled at pure
research, that's where the transistor was invented that's inside
everything from your phone to your car. They developed lighwave
communication and were already deploying that, which became the
backbone of the internet. They developed cell phone technology,
both for the phones and the land side. Along the way they won
numerous Noble prizes, including for finding the radiation in space
that proved the bing bang theory of the universe. But there is no
question that the free market, with many companies competing, sure
drove what they started into the hands of the world at low prices
better and faster than they could ever achieve. All of AT&T was
stuck in a monopoly mindset that they could not shake. That ultimately
led to the downfall of Bell Labs and Lucent, they just coudn't learn
how to compete.

AT&T certainly had Bell Labs but they were not
interested in giving the customer anything new.

Thats a lie with tone dialling and dialling for yourself alone.

They just wanted to make POTS as profitable as they could.

Thats a lie with Bell Labs alone.

Elliott Ness would recognize the phones we had in 1978 and
the only thing that might surprise him is touch tone and that the
Princess phone had a light in it. It took them 50 years to give us
a phone that wasn't black. The only major change in all of that
time was touch tone and that was for them not us.

Bull**** on that last.

It was really designed for inter trunk switching of long distance
calls and it was just an after thought that it got into the phone itself.
Again it was mostly to save them money on operators, just like the
dial phone..

But the addition of tone dialling didnt.