"rbowman" wrote in message
...
On 11/09/2019 04:44 PM, Ralph Mowery wrote:
Walmart is doing similar things. They will make a contract with a
company to buy much more than the company can produce. The company
borrows money to expand. The next time Walmart cuts the price of the
contract. The company has to take that reduced price as they have to
pay back a big load.

I worked for a trucking company that hauled freight for Walmart. Walmart
has its own fleet but they have to bid against outside carriers and the
cheapest one wins. The company eventually lost the contracts. It didn't
matter how well you performed just how cheaply you would work.

In another context, I worked for a company that supplied the styrofoam
clamshells to McDonalds. If the price of crystal styrene dropped a penny a
pound, MickeyD was on the phone looking for a price cut.

But clearly McDs does provide lots of jobs and lots choose to
buy what they produce. In fact you can even make a case that
it does make sense to continue to be able to provide all those
jobs even if the Styrofoam operation does lose some to some
other operation which gets to produce the Styrofoam clamshells
instead and provides those jobs there instead.

I'm always curious where exactly the billions came from.

Currently mostly in the stock price of operations like MS, Alphabet,,
Facebook, Amazon etc. Still real money which does the pension
funds quite a bit of good for most who have a pension etc. And
in the case of those, for those who use those operations too.

Take Bill Gates. I picking him since there's every indication he's a
decent guy that won the lottery. I believe most of his billions are in the
form of Microsoft stock. Exactly what does that mean? What does it mean
when Microsoft gets the JEDI contract and Gates' wealth goes up 3% while
Bezos' goes down 1%?

Not a lot for the pension funds that hold them both.

Yes, there are certainly arseholes like Murdoch and Soros
that get stinking rich and arguably don’t contribute much
at all to society in the produces, but you can make a case
that system which produced the very viable USA economy
today inevitably must produce some arseholes and some
like Paris Hilton too. We havent worked out how to have
one without the other.

Even the state grabbing most of what the billionaires have
when they die doesn’t really work very well as can be seen
with western europe where they tried that for quite a while.
And may arguably be why almost all of the full
commercialisation of almost all technology happens first in
the USA now, with everything from McDs to MS to Amazon
and Facebook and Alphabet to Nike and Wal-Mart, Apple etc.