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#41
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
On 02/08/2019 04:24 PM, Ralph Mowery wrote:
It is not a true monopoly, but Microsoft and the Windows is very close to it for the desk top computers. Amazon is working on it too. Here's the problem I have. I'll stick with Amazon because I'm a Linux user and a little prejudiced but the argument is really the same. When they first started, Amazon was mostly books and CDs. They ****ed me off by taking an order, delaying it, and eventually canceling it when they couldn't deliver to the point where I mostly used Barnes & Noble. Amazon improved. Vastly. I've got Prime and get a lot of items, most of which are delivered in two days. For me, it's not even about saving money as much as I can't buy the stuff locally. I watch the Prime streaming shows and listen to Prime music. Any problems I've had with merchandise has been resolved quickly. All in all I can't say a bad word about Amazon. And now the catch... Should Bezos have become a billionaire? He certainly should be well rewarded for having a vision and making it work, but when does the reward become too much? More importantly, where did all the money come from? I can't say they overcharge; the prices are as good or better than anybody's. Even if they're a little higher to offset the shipping, I've been well and truly raped by 'S&H' to complain about a buck. The people providing the goods must be happy. They're not exploiting Chinese peasants, at least not directly, since they're not making sneakers or iPhones. There has to be gravy in the system someplace. Gates is the same deal. He built on his vision and while I'm not the biggest fan of the OS the programming tools have been excellent since long before Windows. Still, where did all the money come from? otoh, you have people like Richard Sackler who made billions pushing poison and knowing exactly what he was doing as much as any skel on the street corner. Or Madoff the crook, and Soros who profited by almost destroying the Bank of England. I'd happily throw them to AOC to squeeze every drop of blood she can. As I said, I'm a little conflicted... |
#42
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
On 02/08/2019 05:19 PM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
You have something against making spears and wearing animal hides? I'm descended from people who did pretty good with spears and furs... This time of year when it's a little nippy out I contemplate that. If the genetic Just So Stories can be believed, my ancestors chased the glaciers north after the last spell of global warming. Some of those spear chuckers from 15,000 BP did okay or I wouldn't be typing this. They were there skinning critters before those farmers sauntered in from the middle East. Somehow I think I'd enjoy living in a cave and hunting aurochs to living in AOC's paradise on earth. |
#43
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
In article ,
says... Some state laws require a lawyer do a title search. NY was one for me. You take out title insurance if the lawyer didn't make sure the title was clear. Sue the lawyer. I was told by my lawyer that even though they do a title search, if anything pops up, they are not responsiable for it. You should take out the title insurance. What is interisting is that I know a man that does survey of the property. If he makes a mistake, it is up to him to make it right. Just shows how how the lawyers protect theirselves, but screw over the others. |
#44
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
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. but in the US most cable TV companies are monopolies in their areas But only in their area, not the entire country. 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. 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 and neither did Microsoft. Innovation exploded when that happened. Irrelevant to whether it had a monopoly or not. It didnt. |
#45
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
wrote in message ... On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 15:08:37 -0800 (PST), trader_4 wrote: On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 1:17:29 PM UTC-5, wrote: 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. That's because monopolies are few and far between. I can't think of a single company that's actually a monopoly unless they are a utility like power, water, cable, etc. And those are regulated. There are companies that the govt has gone after that have had lots of market power and that have tried to use that power illegally, eg tying products, forcing a company to buy other products to get a sole source product. Microsoft is a monopoly in the office PC business Pigs arse it is. You are free to use Linux or a Mac. and it's major competition is going to be the cell phone/tablet running Android. BTW what regulation is there on cable companies? It is certainly not price controlled or forced to give the customer decent service like Ma Bell was. Maybe you are not old enough to remember what anti trust law actually meant. Trust isnt the same thing as a monopoly. We have different words for a reason. IBM had a lesser market share than Microsoft and the government coerced them to break up into separate business units actively competing with each other, much like GM used to be. But neither were a monopoly at the time. The criteria was controlling more than 90% of any given market. Still not a monopoly. BTW the most oppressive monopoly is the drug companies who buy up drugs that used to be cheap or even free, nobody can compete with them Bull**** they can't. India and Cuba both do. And while ever there is more than one drug company, it clearly isnt a monopoly. and they spike the price 1000% or more. That hardly ever happens and never does with drugs that are off patent. |
#46
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
On 2/8/2019 10:54 PM, rbowman wrote:
Amazon improved. Vastly. I've got Prime and get a lot of items, most of which are delivered in two days. For me, it's not even about saving money as much as I can't buy the stuff locally. I watch the Prime streaming shows and listen to Prime music. Any problems I've had with merchandise has been resolved quickly. All in all I can't say a bad word about Amazon. And now the catch... Should Bezos have become a billionaire? He certainly should be well rewarded for having a vision and making it work, but when does the reward become too much? More importantly, where did all the money come from? I can't say they overcharge; the prices are as good or better than anybody's. Even if they're a little higher to offset the shipping, I've been well and truly raped by 'S&H' to complain about a buck. The people providing the goods must be happy. They're not exploiting Chinese peasants, at least not directly, since they're not making sneakers or iPhones. There has to be gravy in the system someplace. Gates is the same deal. He built on his vision and while I'm not the biggest fan of the OS the programming tools have been excellent since long before Windows. Still, where did all the money come from? It is a way of keeping score. Gates is giving away his money and I read that Bezos is starting to be more charitable too. If you can do some good in the world from your good fortune, you are OK in my book. I places 49 orders with Amazon in the past 6 months. They have stuff not easily found and at good prices. I buy some of my wife's medical supplies from them. I will be getting a new Napoleon grill next week for considerably less than anyplace else. I also like that Bezos is not taking any crap from the Nat Enquirer about his divorce. I have a feeling some people may regret trying to **** with him. |
#47
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 20:54:43 -0700, rbowman wrote:
Gates is the same deal. He built on his vision and while I'm not the biggest fan of the OS the programming tools have been excellent since long before Windows. Still, where did all the money come from? Gates used his early money to buy out his competition and enhance his monopoly position. It became a perpetual motion machine, make more money, buy out more competitors, until he owned over 95% of the business PC market. "Arty" people may be using Apples to do their particular art (CGI etc) but the payroll department is running windows office. |
#48
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
rbowman wrote
Ralph Mowery wrote It is not a true monopoly, but Microsoft and the Windows is very close to it for the desk top computers. Amazon is working on it too. Here's the problem I have. I'll stick with Amazon because I'm a Linux user and a little prejudiced but the argument is really the same. When they first started, Amazon was mostly books and CDs. They ****ed me off by taking an order, delaying it, and eventually canceling it when they couldn't deliver to the point where I mostly used Barnes & Noble. I mostly used others because of the stupid shipping costs to Australia. Amazon improved. Vastly. I've got Prime and get a lot of items, most of which are delivered in two days. For me, it's not even about saving money as much as I can't buy the stuff locally. I watch the Prime streaming shows and listen to Prime music. I don’t bother with either. Don’t have enough time to watch all the free to air broadcast stuff except in the slack time over the summer holidays here over Xmas and this year I am watching Spooks again, which I torrented. I don’t bother with any music anymore. Any problems I've had with merchandise has been resolved quickly. All in all I can't say a bad word about Amazon. I can. They have only chosen to startup here a year ago and still are pathetic compared with amazon in the US or UK. They had organised a very decent deal with our local govt postal system which meant that the freight cost on stuff like a hard drive could be as cheap from the US as stuff bought in the country. But when our govt chose to impose our 10% GST/VAT on all imports, Amazon decided to make the paperwork easier for them and only allowed us to buy stuff from our local amazon. Just recently they reversed themselves on that but even now you can only buy stuff from amazon.com that’s sold and fulfilled by amazon, but not stuff sold by third partys and you still can buy anything from any of the european amazons. I used to buy quite a bit of the specials of the Philips Hue stuff from european amazons, whoever had the best specials. I don’t buy much of that stuff from amazon.com because its 115V. And now the catch... Should Bezos have become a billionaire? He certainly should be well rewarded for having a vision and making it work, And for hanging in there when it took a very long time to make a profit. but when does the reward become too much? More importantly, where did all the money come from? From the amount of Amazon stock he owns and price that has gone to. I can't say they overcharge; the prices are as good or better than anybody's. I get a lot of cheaper stuff from aliexpress and wear the 4 weeks delivery time you get with most stuff. And still find ebay cheaper at times than amazon. Even if they're a little higher to offset the shipping, I've been well and truly raped by 'S&H' to complain about a buck. Sure, but I normally save a lot more than a buck when shopping around. The people providing the goods must be happy. That’s less clear given that many like you don’t even look anywhere else now. They're not exploiting Chinese peasants, at least not directly, since they're not making sneakers or iPhones. Some claim they do exploit those working for them. There has to be gravy in the system someplace. That’s not why Bezos is stinking rich. Gates is the same deal. He built on his vision and while I'm not the biggest fan of the OS the programming tools have been excellent since long before Windows. Still, where did all the money come from? Same place, the stock he holds and the price of that. And amazingly they have returned to being the highest earner too, essentially by the move to the subscription system for office etc. otoh, you have people like Richard Sackler who made billions pushing poison and knowing exactly what he was doing as much as any skel on the street corner. Or Madoff the crook, and Soros who profited by almost destroying the Bank of England. I'd happily throw them to AOC to squeeze every drop of blood she can. But even Bezos total wealth is pretty small beer in the total US tax take and you only get to grab it once. As I said, I'm a little conflicted... |
#49
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
"Ralph Mowery" wrote in message k.net... In article , says... Some state laws require a lawyer do a title search. NY was one for me. You take out title insurance if the lawyer didn't make sure the title was clear. Sue the lawyer. I was told by my lawyer that even though they do a title search, if anything pops up, they are not responsiable for it. That's a lie if they have been negligent doing the title search, didn't do it properly. You should take out the title insurance. It might well be a lot easier to claim on that than to prove to a court that your lawyer had been negligent doing the search. What is interisting is that I know a man that does survey of the property. If he makes a mistake, it is up to him to make it right. That's not the case here, because of the letouts in the contract. Just shows how how the lawyers protect theirselves, but screw over the others. |
#50
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
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. "Your money or your life". There is also collusion and price fixing among companies that are supposed to be competing with each other. 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 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) 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. |
#51
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
wrote in message ... On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 20:54:43 -0700, rbowman wrote: Gates is the same deal. He built on his vision and while I'm not the biggest fan of the OS the programming tools have been excellent since long before Windows. Still, where did all the money come from? Gates used his early money to buy out his competition and enhance his monopoly position. It became a perpetual motion machine, make more money, buy out more competitors, until he owned over 95% of the business PC market. "Arty" people may be using Apples to do their particular art (CGI etc) but the payroll department is running windows office. Not always anymore. Plenty run linux. |
#52
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 15:42:31 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote: wrote in message .. . On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 15:08:37 -0800 (PST), trader_4 wrote: On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 1:17:29 PM UTC-5, wrote: 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. That's because monopolies are few and far between. I can't think of a single company that's actually a monopoly unless they are a utility like power, water, cable, etc. And those are regulated. There are companies that the govt has gone after that have had lots of market power and that have tried to use that power illegally, eg tying products, forcing a company to buy other products to get a sole source product. Microsoft is a monopoly in the office PC business Pigs arse it is. You are free to use Linux or a Mac. Not really in the office environment. Nobody in business is going to screw with Linux for desktop PCs although that is probably what the servers run. Apple is too expensive and the business software is not always going to port over to everyone else running windows. If you can't say you know "office" they are going to drop your application in the trash. and it's major competition is going to be the cell phone/tablet running Android. BTW what regulation is there on cable companies? It is certainly not price controlled or forced to give the customer decent service like Ma Bell was. Maybe you are not old enough to remember what anti trust law actually meant. Trust isnt the same thing as a monopoly. We have different words for a reason. Not in the US DoJ's eyes. They call laws against monopolies "anti trust laws" They just do not enforce them because the monopoly owners own the government. BTW the most oppressive monopoly is the drug companies who buy up drugs that used to be cheap or even free, nobody can compete with them Bull**** they can't. India and Cuba both do. I don't live in India or Cuba. Federal law prevents people from legally importing most drugs And while ever there is more than one drug company, it clearly isnt a monopoly. There is usually only one company making some drugs. and they spike the price 1000% or more. That hardly ever happens and never does with drugs that are off patent. Maybe not in OZ |
#53
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 23:43:00 -0500, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
On 2/8/2019 10:54 PM, rbowman wrote: Amazon improved. Vastly. I've got Prime and get a lot of items, most of which are delivered in two days. For me, it's not even about saving money as much as I can't buy the stuff locally. I watch the Prime streaming shows and listen to Prime music. Any problems I've had with merchandise has been resolved quickly. All in all I can't say a bad word about Amazon. And now the catch... Should Bezos have become a billionaire? He certainly should be well rewarded for having a vision and making it work, but when does the reward become too much? More importantly, where did all the money come from? I can't say they overcharge; the prices are as good or better than anybody's. Even if they're a little higher to offset the shipping, I've been well and truly raped by 'S&H' to complain about a buck. The people providing the goods must be happy. They're not exploiting Chinese peasants, at least not directly, since they're not making sneakers or iPhones. There has to be gravy in the system someplace. Gates is the same deal. He built on his vision and while I'm not the biggest fan of the OS the programming tools have been excellent since long before Windows. Still, where did all the money come from? It is a way of keeping score. Gates is giving away his money and I read that Bezos is starting to be more charitable too. Yeah he is giving half of it to the former Mrs Bezos. |
#54
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
wrote in message ... 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 m... 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. Thats a lie. If you need a particular drug to survive Thats never the case. and only one company can sell it, And neither is that. he can charge what ever he wants. "Your money or your life". There is no such drug. There is also collusion and price fixing among companies that are supposed to be competing with each other. Still not a monopoly, thats collusion. We have different words for a reason. but in the US most cable TV companies are monopolies in their areas But only in their area, not the entire country. So what? So its not a monopoly. If you live. there it is still a monopoly No there is not while ever you are free to watch free to air broadcast TV and to stream it on the net or use a satellite. and unlike what Trader says, there is virtually any regulation of these monopolies. They arent monopolys. 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, It never is. you are still stuck. Nope, you are free to use one of the cellphone systems, or a satellite, or the free to air broadcast TV stations. 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. Thats an utterly bogus definition of a monopoly. 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) Thats an utterly bogus definition of a monopoly. 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. Thats a lie with all off tone dialling, replacing manual operators with dialling by the customer in spades. Without unbundling the phone lines there would have never been a consumer grade modem and no internet for one thing. That last is bull**** too. 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. Sure, but its a lie that there was no innovation. 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. We got the reverse effect when our govt monopoly telco was forced to allow competition. 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. I pay just $10/month for unlimited calls and texts and MMSs to any landline or cellphone in the entire country and 1GB of data. |
#55
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
wrote in message ... On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 15:42:31 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message . .. On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 15:08:37 -0800 (PST), trader_4 wrote: On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 1:17:29 PM UTC-5, wrote: 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. That's because monopolies are few and far between. I can't think of a single company that's actually a monopoly unless they are a utility like power, water, cable, etc. And those are regulated. There are companies that the govt has gone after that have had lots of market power and that have tried to use that power illegally, eg tying products, forcing a company to buy other products to get a sole source product. Microsoft is a monopoly in the office PC business Pigs arse it is. You are free to use Linux or a Mac. Not really in the office environment. Fraid so. Nobody in business is going to screw with Linux for desktop PCs Plenty do. although that is probably what the servers run. Apple is too expensive Not for plenty that publish stuff it isnt. and the business software is not always going to port over to everyone else running windows. If you can't say you know "office" they are going to drop your application in the trash. Thats bull**** too. and it's major competition is going to be the cell phone/tablet running Android. BTW what regulation is there on cable companies? It is certainly not price controlled or forced to give the customer decent service like Ma Bell was. Maybe you are not old enough to remember what anti trust law actually meant. Trust isnt the same thing as a monopoly. We have different words for a reason. Not in the US DoJ's eyes. They call laws against monopolies "anti trust laws" They just do not enforce them because the monopoly owners own the government. The cable and drug companys dont own the govt. BTW the most oppressive monopoly is the drug companies who buy up drugs that used to be cheap or even free, nobody can compete with them Bull**** they can't. India and Cuba both do. I don't live in India or Cuba. Federal law prevents people from legally importing most drugs More fool your govt. And while ever there is more than one drug company, it clearly isnt a monopoly. There is usually only one company making some drugs. and they spike the price 1000% or more. That hardly ever happens and never does with drugs that are off patent. Maybe not in OZ Not in the US either. There is just one example of that happening. |
#56
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 17:00:26 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote: wrote in message .. . 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 om... 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. Thats a lie. If you need a particular drug to survive Thats never the case. and only one company can sell it, And neither is that. he can charge what ever he wants. "Your money or your life". There is no such drug. Read this https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-increase-in-a-drugs-price-raises-protests.html There are plenty of drugs out there that are seeing the same thing happen. There is also collusion and price fixing among companies that are supposed to be competing with each other. Still not a monopoly, thats collusion. We have different words for a reason. but in the US most cable TV companies are monopolies in their areas But only in their area, not the entire country. So what? So its not a monopoly. If you live. there it is still a monopoly No there is not while ever you are free to watch free to air broadcast TV and to stream it on the net or use a satellite. and unlike what Trader says, there is virtually any regulation of these monopolies. They arent monopolys. 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, It never is. It is in lots of places here. The only truly high speed internet is cable from the TV company or maybe fiber from the phone company but that will only be in urban areas. I can't get it and I am not exactly out in the boonies. I am in a city of 30,000 between much larger cities. Other than cable, the best I can do is 10m. It works for me but I am not an HD fanatic. you are still stuck. Nope, you are free to use one of the cellphone systems, or a satellite, or the free to air broadcast TV stations. 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. Thats an utterly bogus definition of a monopoly. 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) Thats an utterly bogus definition of a monopoly. Tell it to the courts. " Discussions of the requisite market share for monopoly power commonly begin with Judge Hand's statement in United States v. Aluminum Co. of America that a market share of ninety percent "is enough to constitute a monopoly" That was what the court used to prosecute IBM. 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. Thats a lie with all off tone dialling, replacing manual operators with dialling by the customer in spades. It took AT&T 30 years to get from operators plugging in cables to touch tone dialing and even after being introduced there were still plenty of rotary dial phones out there still on lease from AT&T for 15 more years. They charged you $1 a month extra for touch right up until they were broken up. In the 30 years after that we got the whole smart phone phenomenon along with everything that happened with data. If Ma Bell still had a choke hold on the long lines most of that would have not happened. The first thing most customers saw after they broke up the phone company was a flood of things you could now legally plug into your line like fax machines, answering machines, far more capable phones and that modem we would not have had an internet without. Without unbundling the phone lines there would have never been a consumer grade modem and no internet for one thing. That last is bull**** too. It was illegal to plug anything into a phone line that the phone company did not lease to you and their modems cost as much a month as a car payment. 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. Sure, but its a lie that there was no innovation. The only innovation was ways for them to make more money leasing you the same tired old phones. Getting rid of operators and putting in touch dialing was to save them money, not to be better for you. 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. We got the reverse effect when our govt monopoly telco was forced to allow competition. That is what you live for being in a place where you do everything backwards I guess. Phone rates dropped like a stone right after AT&T broke up. 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. I pay just $10/month for unlimited calls and texts and MMSs to any landline or cellphone in the entire country and 1GB of data. .... and how much was a regular phone in 1975 |
#57
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
wrote in message ... On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 17:00:26 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message . .. On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 15:36:47 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message m... On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 07:33:23 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message news:ejhr5e18d16nu8mrnu9sr659a96d26r4a8@4ax. com... 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. Thats a lie. If you need a particular drug to survive Thats never the case. and only one company can sell it, And neither is that. he can charge what ever he wants. "Your money or your life". There is no such drug. Read this https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-increase-in-a-drugs-price-raises-protests.html Just because some ****wit Murdoch journo claims something... There are plenty of drugs out there that are seeing the same thing happen. Pig arse there is with that stupid claim that just one drug can save your life. Daraprim isnt the only drug that can save any individual's live and it didnt increase by 1000% either. There is also collusion and price fixing among companies that are supposed to be competing with each other. Still not a monopoly, thats collusion. We have different words for a reason. but in the US most cable TV companies are monopolies in their areas But only in their area, not the entire country. So what? So its not a monopoly. If you live. there it is still a monopoly No there is not while ever you are free to watch free to air broadcast TV and to stream it on the net or use a satellite. and unlike what Trader says, there is virtually any regulation of these monopolies. They arent monopolys. 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, It never is. It is in lots of places here. Bull****. The only truly high speed internet is cable from the TV company Bull****. or maybe fiber from the phone company In which case there is no monopoly. but that will only be in urban areas. I can't get it and I am not exactly out in the boonies. I am in a city of 30,000 between much larger cities. But you do have a choice of net service. Other than cable, the best I can do is 10m. It works for me but I am not an HD fanatic. So there is no monopoly there. you are still stuck. Nope, you are free to use one of the cellphone systems, or a satellite, or the free to air broadcast TV stations. 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. Thats an utterly bogus definition of a monopoly. 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) Thats an utterly bogus definition of a monopoly. Tell it to the courts. " Discussions of the requisite market share for monopoly power commonly begin with Judge Hand's statement in United States v. Aluminum Co. of America that a market share of ninety percent "is enough to constitute a monopoly" Your legal system has been completely off the ****ing rails for centurys now. 90% isnt a ****ing monopoly. That was what the court used to prosecute IBM. IBM never had a monopoly on anything. 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. Thats a lie with all off tone dialling, replacing manual operators with dialling by the customer in spades. It took AT&T 30 years to get from operators plugging in cables to touch tone dialing and even after being introduced there were still plenty of rotary dial phones out there still on lease from AT&T for 15 more years. Your silly claim about no innovation is still completely silly with the customer being able to dial the calls alone. They charged you $1 a month extra for touch right up until they were broken up. And didnt charge you any more to dial a number instead of using the operator. In the 30 years after that we got the whole smart phone phenomenon along with everything that happened with data. If Ma Bell still had a choke hold on the long lines most of that would have not happened. Bull****. The first thing most customers saw after they broke up the phone company was a flood of things you could now legally plug into your line like fax machines, answering machines, far more capable phones and that modem we would not have had an internet without. Bull**** on that last. Without unbundling the phone lines there would have never been a consumer grade modem and no internet for one thing. That last is bull**** too. It was illegal to plug anything into a phone line that the phone company did not lease to you and their modems cost as much a month as a car payment. The internet happened anyway. 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. Sure, but its a lie that there was no innovation. The only innovation was ways for them to make more money leasing you the same tired old phones. Thats a lie with dialing the number for yourself. Getting rid of operators and putting in touch dialing was to save them money, not to be better for you. Corse its better for you. 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. We got the reverse effect when our govt monopoly telco was forced to allow competition. That is what you live for being in a place where you do everything backwards I guess. We dont do everything backwards and our cellphone system leaves yours for dead. And we arent actually stupid enough to charge people for receiving and incoming cellphone call either. Phone rates dropped like a stone right after AT&T broke up. And you clowns ended up with a much worse cellphone system. 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. I pay just $10/month for unlimited calls and texts and MMSs to any landline or cellphone in the entire country and 1GB of data. ... and how much was a regular phone in 1975 We never had anything even remotely like that in 1975. The cost per month was something like $10 per month for a landline, but local calls were 25c each, unlimited time and long distance calls cost large amounts of money. I could easily spend $2K on long distance calls a year, mostly to the state capital for pre internet modem calls, fidonet, on BBSs. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 6:24:43 PM UTC-5, Ralph Mowery wrote:
In article , says... 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. It is not a true monopoly, but Microsoft and the Windows is very close to it for the desk top computers. That is true. The other two are the Medical profession and lawyers. That's totally false. There are all millions of all kinds of medical professionals and lawyers in the market, that are competitors. I found out that when I sold a house and bought another one for cash that I had to have a lawyer do some of the paper work. By Law I could not do it myself even if I knew how. But you could choose any lawyer within the state, you could shop around. It's like auto insurance being mandatory. That doesn't make it a monopoly. For it to be a monopoly there would have to be only one insurance company. I can not just go to a drug store and get even simple perscription medicine with out the doctor's paper work. Also irrelevant to what constitutes a monopoly. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 11:23:45 PM UTC-5, Ralph Mowery wrote:
In article , says... Some state laws require a lawyer do a title search. NY was one for me. You take out title insurance if the lawyer didn't make sure the title was clear. Sue the lawyer. I was told by my lawyer that even though they do a title search, if anything pops up, they are not responsiable for it. You should take out the title insurance. What is interisting is that I know a man that does survey of the property. If he makes a mistake, it is up to him to make it right. Just shows how how the lawyers protect theirselves, but screw over the others. Title insurance through a title insurance company, seems like a very reasonable approach to me. To start with, no mortgage company that I know of will give you a mortgage without it. More importantly, if you were to rely on a lawyer to try to collect if it turns out decades later that the title isn't clear, what happens if he's dead, out of business, moved to another state, gone broke, etc? And even if he's still there, now you'd have to prove that he made the mistake. He's a lawyer who's fees will be free, you have to hire a lawyer to sue him. With a title insurance company, they are guaranteeing that you have clear title, regardless of who screwed up or when. Here in NJ title searches are done by the title insurance companies. |
#60
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 12:02:25 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 20:54:43 -0700, rbowman wrote: Gates is the same deal. He built on his vision and while I'm not the biggest fan of the OS the programming tools have been excellent since long before Windows. Still, where did all the money come from? Gates used his early money to buy out his competition and enhance his monopoly position. It became a perpetual motion machine, make more money, buy out more competitors, until he owned over 95% of the business PC market. "Arty" people may be using Apples to do their particular art (CGI etc) but the payroll department is running windows office. The early success that put them in a near monopoly position, was not about buying out competition, but by being very lucky to have been chosen by IBM to provide the OS for their first PC. That's how MSFT owned the business PC market. IBM and all the IBM clones ran MSFT OS and had no choice. It was the power of the IBM brand, setting a standard that really put them where they are today. Later they used that success to expand into other areas, eg applications, internet, etc, a lot of that through acquisitions. |
#61
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 9:41:18 PM UTC-5, wrote:
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****. I would start with the drug companies Drug companies are most definitely not monopolies. They are competing against each other. Sure, company A may be the only one with a certain new drug for at a any given point in time, but they have competitors working on their own competing drugs for to treat the same thing. There are some exceptions, for drugs for rare conditions, where only one company happens to have a drug and no other company is interested. But that doesn't make for the definition of a monopoly. but in the US most cable TV companies are monopolies in their areas and Comcast is a monster owning entertainment from the studio to the set top box and everything in between. That's true and those monopolies are granted by govt and then they are regulated, just like other utilities. Microsoft is also a monopoly by the definition used when the broke up the phone company and IBM in the 70s. Not even close to the AT&T monopoly. AT&T had control of the phone system from one end of the call in NY to the other in CA and everywhere in between. It was all over their system, their eqpt, their rates. There was no breakup of IBM, the govt dropped that case. But I would agree that MSFT has been in a position of greater market dominance than IBM was in the 70s when the DOJ was trying to break it up. Innovation exploded when that happened. It did in both the case of AT&T and IBM. One was busted up, the other was not. It was innovation and market forces that reduced IBM's dominance. It would have been much harder for innovation to have busted AT&T, because they controlled everything, including the wires into your house and it was all wrapped up in govt regulation too. |
#62
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
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. 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. 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. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 1:37:41 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 17:00:26 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message .. . 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 om... 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. Thats a lie. If you need a particular drug to survive Thats never the case. and only one company can sell it, And neither is that. he can charge what ever he wants. "Your money or your life". There is no such drug. Read this https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-increase-in-a-drugs-price-raises-protests.html There are plenty of drugs out there that are seeing the same thing happen. There is also collusion and price fixing among companies that are supposed to be competing with each other. Still not a monopoly, thats collusion. We have different words for a reason. but in the US most cable TV companies are monopolies in their areas But only in their area, not the entire country. So what? So its not a monopoly. If you live. there it is still a monopoly No there is not while ever you are free to watch free to air broadcast TV and to stream it on the net or use a satellite. and unlike what Trader says, there is virtually any regulation of these monopolies. They arent monopolys. 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, It never is. It is in lots of places here. The only truly high speed internet is cable from the TV company or maybe fiber from the phone company but that will only be in urban areas. I can't get it and I am not exactly out in the boonies. I am in a city of 30,000 between much larger cities. Other than cable, the best I can do is 10m. It works for me but I am not an HD fanatic. Same here in suburban NJ. Only one cable company where I live. Some nearby areas do have a choice between that and Fios, but they are the exception. Most places here, it's one cable company. There are no comparable high speed internet options. The only thing you could do would be sat, which sucks, has high latency, order of magnitude lower speed and costs more. you are still stuck. Nope, you are free to use one of the cellphone systems, or a satellite, or the free to air broadcast TV stations. 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. Thats an utterly bogus definition of a monopoly. 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) Thats an utterly bogus definition of a monopoly. Tell it to the courts. " Discussions of the requisite market share for monopoly power commonly begin with Judge Hand's statement in United States v. Aluminum Co. of America that a market share of ninety percent "is enough to constitute a monopoly" That was what the court used to prosecute IBM. But the govt later dropped the case against IBM. And just because you have one judge that says something, doesn't make it law or right. Look at all the court decisions flipping back and forth with Trump as the cases move from one court to another. What the judge should have said was that 90% means that you have market power approaching that of a monopoly. BTW, monopolies are not illegal. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 9:49:50 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 15:08:37 -0800 (PST), trader_4 wrote: On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 1:17:29 PM UTC-5, wrote: 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. That's because monopolies are few and far between. I can't think of a single company that's actually a monopoly unless they are a utility like power, water, cable, etc. And those are regulated. There are companies that the govt has gone after that have had lots of market power and that have tried to use that power illegally, eg tying products, forcing a company to buy other products to get a sole source product. Microsoft is a monopoly in the office PC business and it's major competition is going to be the cell phone/tablet running Android. BTW what regulation is there on cable companies? It is certainly not price controlled or forced to give the customer decent service like Ma Bell was. IDK how it works in FL, but here in NJ cable companies are price controlled by the state regulating authority. Maybe you are not old enough to remember what anti trust law actually meant. I know exactly what it means and it's not what you think. IBM had a lesser market share than Microsoft and the government coerced them to break up into separate business units actively competing with each other, much like GM used to be. That is false. The govt would up dropping it's antitrust case against IBM and there was no govt ordered, govt forced breakup. The criteria was controlling more than 90% of any given market. BTW the most oppressive monopoly is the drug companies who buy up drugs that used to be cheap or even free, nobody can compete with them and they spike the price 1000% or more. That is wrong. Show us in the the law, where there is any criteria of 90%. There isn't. In fact, under law, monopolies are perfectly legal. And again, just because a company has a sole sourced product or even many sole sourced products, doesn't make the company a monopoly. I think the drug situation you're referring to is in fact, the one being driven by govt. The FDA has decided that old drugs that have been around for 75, 100 years, that never went through testing like modern drugs have, need to go through that process. Through the powers vested in them by law, they can strike deals with a drug company, where the drug company does that testing and in return gets exclusivity to that drug for a period of X years. An example is colchicine which has been used to treat gout for 100 years and cost maybe 20 cents a pill. Now that is no longer available, it's become Colcrys, available only from one company and 10x or 20x the price. But it's the govt that did it. Does that mean that drug company is now a monopoly? No. There are other drugs available. Should this whole unholy process be looked into? Absolutely. For starters, it seems to me there should be a public auction process open to all bidders, to compete to win the rights to this kind of contract, where they bid on what the price they will charge for the drug for the number of years they have exclusivity. And while the FDA forcing this testing is likely doing more harm than good, the studies do have the potential for some benefit too. In the case of colchicine, they found that it's just as effective at a lower, better tolerate dosage, for example.. Not saying that justifies it becoming 20x the cost, just that there was at least some new good that came from it. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 12:29:05 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 15:42:31 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message .. . On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 15:08:37 -0800 (PST), trader_4 wrote: On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 1:17:29 PM UTC-5, wrote: 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. That's because monopolies are few and far between. I can't think of a single company that's actually a monopoly unless they are a utility like power, water, cable, etc. And those are regulated. There are companies that the govt has gone after that have had lots of market power and that have tried to use that power illegally, eg tying products, forcing a company to buy other products to get a sole source product. Microsoft is a monopoly in the office PC business Pigs arse it is. You are free to use Linux or a Mac. Not really in the office environment. Nobody in business is going to screw with Linux for desktop PCs although that is probably what the servers run. Apple is too expensive and the business software is not always going to port over to everyone else running windows. If you can't say you know "office" they are going to drop your application in the trash. and it's major competition is going to be the cell phone/tablet running Android. BTW what regulation is there on cable companies? It is certainly not price controlled or forced to give the customer decent service like Ma Bell was. Maybe you are not old enough to remember what anti trust law actually meant. Trust isnt the same thing as a monopoly. We have different words for a reason. Not in the US DoJ's eyes. They call laws against monopolies "anti trust laws" They just do not enforce them because the monopoly owners own the government. Let's start with the basics. There is no law against monopolies. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 04:48:52 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote: On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 6:24:43 PM UTC-5, Ralph Mowery wrote: In article , says... 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. It is not a true monopoly, but Microsoft and the Windows is very close to it for the desk top computers. That is true. The other two are the Medical profession and lawyers. That's totally false. There are all millions of all kinds of medical professionals and lawyers in the market, that are competitors. I found out that when I sold a house and bought another one for cash that I had to have a lawyer do some of the paper work. By Law I could not do it myself even if I knew how. But you could choose any lawyer within the state, you could shop around. It's like auto insurance being mandatory. That doesn't make it a monopoly. For it to be a monopoly there would have to be only one insurance company. I can not just go to a drug store and get even simple perscription medicine with out the doctor's paper work. Also irrelevant to what constitutes a monopoly. Those are examples of restraint of trade more than monopoly. Doctors and lawyers have coerced the government to require people to use their services. There is no real guarantee their work is better than anyone else's only that they have learned the magic handshake and that they have obtained a license from the government. Doctors, lawyers and insurance companies are a financial perpetual motion machine that lays a massive tax on everything you do and everything you buy. It is no coincidence that about half of the money in politics comes from these 3 sectors. (mostly to democrats) |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 04:55:31 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote: On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 11:23:45 PM UTC-5, Ralph Mowery wrote: In article , says... Some state laws require a lawyer do a title search. NY was one for me. You take out title insurance if the lawyer didn't make sure the title was clear. Sue the lawyer. I was told by my lawyer that even though they do a title search, if anything pops up, they are not responsiable for it. You should take out the title insurance. What is interisting is that I know a man that does survey of the property. If he makes a mistake, it is up to him to make it right. Just shows how how the lawyers protect theirselves, but screw over the others. Title insurance through a title insurance company, seems like a very reasonable approach to me. To start with, no mortgage company that I know of will give you a mortgage without it. More importantly, if you were to rely on a lawyer to try to collect if it turns out decades later that the title isn't clear, what happens if he's dead, out of business, moved to another state, gone broke, etc? And even if he's still there, now you'd have to prove that he made the mistake. He's a lawyer who's fees will be free, you have to hire a lawyer to sue him. With a title insurance company, they are guaranteeing that you have clear title, regardless of who screwed up or when. Here in NJ title searches are done by the title insurance companies. Title searches are getting a lot easier now that this stuff is online. It used to be fairly cumbersome when you were down at the court house digging through old paper records and fairly easy to miss something but now you can usually do this from your Lazyboy. The last time I was looking at a property to buy I had every record the title company turned up going all the way back to when the land was stolen from the indians by the federal government. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
On 2/9/2019 8:24 AM, trader_4 wrote:
Drug companies are most definitely not monopolies. They are competing against each other. Sure, company A may be the only one with a certain new drug for at a any given point in time, but they have competitors working on their own competing drugs for to treat the same thing. There are some exceptions, for drugs for rare conditions, where only one company happens to have a drug and no other company is interested. But that doesn't make for the definition of a monopoly. Right, but some are unethical thieves and opportunist. There was one on the news this week where one company bought out a small drug company, made a minor change to the formula and the cost to patient went from $0 to $375,000 a year. They make monopolies look good. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 05:09:43 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote: On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 12:02:25 AM UTC-5, wrote: On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 20:54:43 -0700, rbowman wrote: Gates is the same deal. He built on his vision and while I'm not the biggest fan of the OS the programming tools have been excellent since long before Windows. Still, where did all the money come from? Gates used his early money to buy out his competition and enhance his monopoly position. It became a perpetual motion machine, make more money, buy out more competitors, until he owned over 95% of the business PC market. "Arty" people may be using Apples to do their particular art (CGI etc) but the payroll department is running windows office. The early success that put them in a near monopoly position, was not about buying out competition, but by being very lucky to have been chosen by IBM to provide the OS for their first PC. That's how MSFT owned the business PC market. IBM and all the IBM clones ran MSFT OS and had no choice. It was the power of the IBM brand, setting a standard that really put them where they are today. Later they used that success to expand into other areas, eg applications, internet, etc, a lot of that through acquisitions. Bill Gates bought DOS from Digital Research without telling them about the IBM deal and most of his "innovation" since then was also from simply buying a better package from a competitor. His biggest stroke of luck was that IBM had just fended off the DoJ anti trust suit that had gone on for a decade and IBM was not in a position to buy DOS from him outright and start that process all over again. It is also why anti trust suits are good for the consumer. Without having an unbundled hardware and software model, there would not have been a clone PC market. They would still be a business machine, priced out of the reach of most consumers, like the PS/2 was. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 05:24:45 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote: On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 9:41:18 PM UTC-5, wrote: 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****. I would start with the drug companies Drug companies are most definitely not monopolies. They are competing against each other. Sure, company A may be the only one with a certain new drug for at a any given point in time, but they have competitors working on their own competing drugs for to treat the same thing. There are some exceptions, for drugs for rare conditions, where only one company happens to have a drug and no other company is interested. But that doesn't make for the definition of a monopoly. There is certainly competition for mass market drugs that treat things like baldness or ED but if you have a specialized drug that only treats a few thousand patients, there is typically only one source and those people get ****ed. The government makes it too easy for drug companies to extend patents. There are drugs that have been out there for decades and they make some insignificant change that allows a whole new patent to be issued without giving up the right to the old one. but in the US most cable TV companies are monopolies in their areas and Comcast is a monster owning entertainment from the studio to the set top box and everything in between. That's true and those monopolies are granted by govt and then they are regulated, just like other utilities. No they aren't. The government has no control over pricing nor the level of service like you would with a water company or a PoCo Microsoft is also a monopoly by the definition used when the broke up the phone company and IBM in the 70s. Not even close to the AT&T monopoly. AT&T had control of the phone system from one end of the call in NY to the other in CA and everywhere in between. It was all over their system, their eqpt, their rates. There was no breakup of IBM, the govt dropped that case. But I would agree that MSFT has been in a position of greater market dominance than IBM was in the 70s when the DOJ was trying to break it up. IBM was broken up tho and it was along the guidelines of the terms sought in the federal suit in anticipation of losing or having to sign a consent decree like they did in 1956. They created several totally separate operating units that were actively competing with each other and they had totally separate structures from engineering to manufacturing to sales to service. They were not even using common parts or software and the people lived in separate worlds. It was easier to integrate Rohm people into the core IBM business than people from the General Services Division when they finally merged in the early 90s. . .. Innovation exploded when that happened. It did in both the case of AT&T and IBM. One was busted up, the other was not. It was innovation and market forces that reduced IBM's dominance. It would have been much harder for innovation to have busted AT&T, because they controlled everything, including the wires into your house and it was all wrapped up in govt regulation too. AT&T had no interest in innovation other than things that improved it's bottom line and they were doing just fine providing POTS service. Why change? With them owning all of the wire, nobody could really get a foot hold into much of anything else. The closest allegory these days is the cable company. A breakup of similar scope would be unbundling the actual cable from the delivery of content. That was the foot in the door of breaking up AT&T. They had to lease their long line infrastructure to anyone who wanted to compete with them and they could only charge the actual cost of maintaining that wire plus a reasonable profit. They also lost control of the end of the last mile, allowing customers to own their own phone. That morphed into anything you could plug into a phone line very quickly like the hayes modem that created the consumer portal to what is now the internet. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
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. They just wanted to make POTS as profitable as they could. 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. 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.. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 05:54:13 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote: On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 1:37:41 AM UTC-5, wrote: On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 17:00:26 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message .. . 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 om... 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. Thats a lie. If you need a particular drug to survive Thats never the case. and only one company can sell it, And neither is that. he can charge what ever he wants. "Your money or your life". There is no such drug. Read this https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-increase-in-a-drugs-price-raises-protests.html There are plenty of drugs out there that are seeing the same thing happen. There is also collusion and price fixing among companies that are supposed to be competing with each other. Still not a monopoly, thats collusion. We have different words for a reason. but in the US most cable TV companies are monopolies in their areas But only in their area, not the entire country. So what? So its not a monopoly. If you live. there it is still a monopoly No there is not while ever you are free to watch free to air broadcast TV and to stream it on the net or use a satellite. and unlike what Trader says, there is virtually any regulation of these monopolies. They arent monopolys. 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, It never is. It is in lots of places here. The only truly high speed internet is cable from the TV company or maybe fiber from the phone company but that will only be in urban areas. I can't get it and I am not exactly out in the boonies. I am in a city of 30,000 between much larger cities. Other than cable, the best I can do is 10m. It works for me but I am not an HD fanatic. Same here in suburban NJ. Only one cable company where I live. Some nearby areas do have a choice between that and Fios, but they are the exception. Most places here, it's one cable company. There are no comparable high speed internet options. The only thing you could do would be sat, which sucks, has high latency, order of magnitude lower speed and costs more. Rod does have a point that you may someday soon have 5G cell service that could be a player but right now it is prohibitively expensive and still 4G or even 3G in some places. you are still stuck. Nope, you are free to use one of the cellphone systems, or a satellite, or the free to air broadcast TV stations. 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. Thats an utterly bogus definition of a monopoly. 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) Thats an utterly bogus definition of a monopoly. Tell it to the courts. " Discussions of the requisite market share for monopoly power commonly begin with Judge Hand's statement in United States v. Aluminum Co. of America that a market share of ninety percent "is enough to constitute a monopoly" That was what the court used to prosecute IBM. But the govt later dropped the case against IBM. And just because you have one judge that says something, doesn't make it law or right. Look at all the court decisions flipping back and forth with Trump as the cases move from one court to another. What the judge should have said was that 90% means that you have market power approaching that of a monopoly. BTW, monopolies are not illegal. They were in 1969, now not so much. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 06:15:33 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote: On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 9:49:50 PM UTC-5, wrote: On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 15:08:37 -0800 (PST), trader_4 wrote: On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 1:17:29 PM UTC-5, wrote: 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. That's because monopolies are few and far between. I can't think of a single company that's actually a monopoly unless they are a utility like power, water, cable, etc. And those are regulated. There are companies that the govt has gone after that have had lots of market power and that have tried to use that power illegally, eg tying products, forcing a company to buy other products to get a sole source product. Microsoft is a monopoly in the office PC business and it's major competition is going to be the cell phone/tablet running Android. BTW what regulation is there on cable companies? It is certainly not price controlled or forced to give the customer decent service like Ma Bell was. IDK how it works in FL, but here in NJ cable companies are price controlled by the state regulating authority. It certainly does not seem to be the case here and nobody is regulating the level of service. Maybe that is why people don't hate Comcast that much up there. Maybe you are not old enough to remember what anti trust law actually meant. I know exactly what it means and it's not what you think. IBM had a lesser market share than Microsoft and the government coerced them to break up into separate business units actively competing with each other, much like GM used to be. That is false. The govt would up dropping it's antitrust case against IBM and there was no govt ordered, govt forced breakup. I was there, where were you? IBM broke itself up right along the guidelines set up by the government and that is why Reagan's DoJ finally decided the case was moot. The criteria was controlling more than 90% of any given market. BTW the most oppressive monopoly is the drug companies who buy up drugs that used to be cheap or even free, nobody can compete with them and they spike the price 1000% or more. That is wrong. Show us in the the law, where there is any criteria of 90%. There isn't. In fact, under law, monopolies are perfectly legal. And again, just because a company has a sole sourced product or even many sole sourced products, doesn't make the company a monopoly. I think the drug situation you're referring to is in fact, the one being driven by govt. The FDA has decided that old drugs that have been around for 75, 100 years, that never went through testing like modern drugs have, need to go through that process. Through the powers vested in them by law, they can strike deals with a drug company, where the drug company does that testing and in return gets exclusivity to that drug for a period of X years. An example is colchicine which has been used to treat gout for 100 years and cost maybe 20 cents a pill. Now that is no longer available, it's become Colcrys, available only from one company and 10x or 20x the price. But it's the govt that did it. Does that mean that drug company is now a monopoly? No. There are other drugs available. Should this whole unholy process be looked into? Absolutely. For starters, it seems to me there should be a public auction process open to all bidders, to compete to win the rights to this kind of contract, where they bid on what the price they will charge for the drug for the number of years they have exclusivity. And while the FDA forcing this testing is likely doing more harm than good, the studies do have the potential for some benefit too. In the case of colchicine, they found that it's just as effective at a lower, better tolerate dosage, for example. Not saying that justifies it becoming 20x the cost, just that there was at least some new good that came from it. All you are saying is the FDA is complicit in drug company monopolies. They make the testing of a new drug so expensive nobody wants to develop a drug unless it will have millions of customers or that they can charge exorbitant prices. Many countries will price control these drugs so they make up the difference here. Since insurance companies will pay most of that cost, the consumer does not realize what the real cost of the drugs are, they just know insurance cost is outrageous. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
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#79
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 06:20:52 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote: On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 12:29:05 AM UTC-5, wrote: On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 15:42:31 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message .. . On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 15:08:37 -0800 (PST), trader_4 wrote: On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 1:17:29 PM UTC-5, wrote: 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. That's because monopolies are few and far between. I can't think of a single company that's actually a monopoly unless they are a utility like power, water, cable, etc. And those are regulated. There are companies that the govt has gone after that have had lots of market power and that have tried to use that power illegally, eg tying products, forcing a company to buy other products to get a sole source product. Microsoft is a monopoly in the office PC business Pigs arse it is. You are free to use Linux or a Mac. Not really in the office environment. Nobody in business is going to screw with Linux for desktop PCs although that is probably what the servers run. Apple is too expensive and the business software is not always going to port over to everyone else running windows. If you can't say you know "office" they are going to drop your application in the trash. and it's major competition is going to be the cell phone/tablet running Android. BTW what regulation is there on cable companies? It is certainly not price controlled or forced to give the customer decent service like Ma Bell was. Maybe you are not old enough to remember what anti trust law actually meant. Trust isnt the same thing as a monopoly. We have different words for a reason. Not in the US DoJ's eyes. They call laws against monopolies "anti trust laws" They just do not enforce them because the monopoly owners own the government. Let's start with the basics. There is no law against monopolies. The DoJ used to think there was. (Sherman etc) I agree now they don't care and the consumer suffers. It is a simple case of companies figuring out you can't beat the government so just buy the congress. You only have to look at who is giving the most in bribe money to see that in action. They spent $5.8 BILLION on last years mid term. 60% of that was on house races alone. Doctors lawyers and insurance companies ponied up about half of that. David Cohen VP of Comcast is the biggest single bundler for the DNC and they are supposed to be looking out for the little guy. How hard do you think they are looking? |
#80
Posted to alt.home.repair
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
On 2/8/2019 10:20 PM, rbowman wrote:
On 02/08/2019 10:39 AM, Frank wrote: AOC is looney tunes.Â* I don't know why the media gives her any respect. I will never watch 60 Minutes again after they had her on and made her appear normal. She's young, somewhat photogenic, and attracts viewers, either True Believers or people waiting to laugh at her next brain spasm. It worked for Trump, not the young, photogenic part of course, but he was a lot more interesting that Little Marco, Low Energy Jeb, Lyin' Ted, or Huckleberry Hound. Ever watch 'The Last Hurrah' or read the book? O'Connor wrote it in '56 and it took 60 years to ripen. Limbaugh called AOC bug eyed the other day. Ain't the the truth? She is young and attractive but she's like the fitness trainer I knew that was physically perfect but then she opened her mouth and the whole image evaporated. |
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