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#81
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 10:15:35 -0500, Ralph Mowery
wrote: In article , says... If you need a particular drug to survive That?s 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. Check ou the epi-pen (what ever it is spelled). It was not too expensive, but someone else took overt the company and it went to almost $ 400 per pen. My wife has been taking a drug that is only made by one company. Without the insurance it would be about $ 400 per month. With the insurance it is about $ 40. We all still pay. All insurance does is hide cost. It still costs. |
#82
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
On 2/9/2019 11:50 AM, Ralph Mowery wrote:
I would not have a Windows 10 computer except that Turobo tax quit running under Windows XP. I do not use the operating system except to load in programs I want to run. I cold care less about all the things Win 10 is suppose to do vers XP. I use TT on line. Have for years. I see no reason to put it on my computer when the latest is a click away. |
#83
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 07:39:37 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote: On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 10:15:47 AM UTC-5, Ralph Mowery wrote: In article , says... If you need a particular drug to survive That?s 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. Check ou the epi-pen (what ever it is spelled). It was not too expensive, but someone else took overt the company and it went to almost $ 400 per pen. My wife has been taking a drug that is only made by one company. Without the insurance it would be about $ 400 per month. With the insurance it is about $ 40. That's a good example of the market actually working. The company that made the Epipen jacked the price up, because there was no competition. Competitors were working on generics, the higher price likely help accelerate it and it didn't take long for a generic equivalent to show up for $100. Yeah $100 for a widget that costs about a quarter to make injecting a drug that has been around for a half a century ... sweet |
#84
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
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#85
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 10:48:00 -0500, Ralph Mowery
wrote: In article , says... 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. That is only partof the story. GAtes and a company called something like Digital Research were in competition. Gates out smarted DR. He asked IBM to put out both and let the public choose. DR sold the system for about $ 150 and MS for $ 49. People being what they are bought mostly the $ 49 version. That gave MS a big start money wise. There was a couple of other operating systems out,but they never made a go of it. I am thinking maybe DR. DOS DR DOS was Digital Research (the DR part) and that is where Gates got DOS in the first place. Both were derivatives of CPM. The shared market thing was between IBM (PC DOS) and Microsoft (MSDOS). They were virtually the same product up until around V.4 when the features started diverging and by 6, they had different numbers. (MS was 6.22, IBM was 6.3 for a similar product) MS sort of stole the windows design and the mouse from other companies. Both Apple and Microsoft stole the mouse from Xerox. That is also where the GUI idea came from. |
#86
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 11:50:31 -0500, Ralph Mowery
wrote: In article , says... 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. Gates did not buy DOS from DR. They were compeating companies. DR sold their system for about $ 150 or $ 250 and MS for $ 49. People went to the less expensive system. Gates bought the operating system from another company and licensed the use to IBM. It was a very smart move for MS. They do not really sell their products, but license the use of them. It is a derivative of CPM that was from DR. They ended up having to pay to avoid being sued the way I understand it. |
#87
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 12:19:41 -0500, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
On 2/9/2019 11:50 AM, Ralph Mowery wrote: I would not have a Windows 10 computer except that Turobo tax quit running under Windows XP. I do not use the operating system except to load in programs I want to run. I cold care less about all the things Win 10 is suppose to do vers XP. I use TT on line. Have for years. I see no reason to put it on my computer when the latest is a click away. I prefer a Ticonderoga #7 but my return is not that complicated these days. When I had a business I used TT. |
#88
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
Ralph Mowery wrote
Rod Speed wrote If you need a particular drug to survive That?s 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. Check ou the epi-pen (what ever it is spelled). It was not too expensive, but someone else took overt the company and it went to almost $ 400 per pen. Not here it didn't. My wife has been taking a drug that is only made by one company. Sure, but it isnt the only drug that can be used for that medical condition. Without the insurance it would be about $ 400 per month. With the insurance it is about $ 40. Still not a monopoly because it isnt the only drug for that condition. |
#89
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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... 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 did not mean it was a manopoloy by strict definition. Say I want to open up a business to repair TV sets. All I have to do is go to the court house and fill out a few forms and open up my business. If I want to be a lawyer, I have to do all sorts of things. Go to school (can't learn law by myself), pass a law exam and probably many other things. Same with the doctors. Notice that then have never advertised the prices. Maybe the are now. Say I have a broken bone, can I look on the internet and see how much it will cost ? no. I think I may have the flu. Can I look in the news paper and see any prices for a doctor, no. You can here. And that has nothing to do with a monopoly anyway. About the same with lawyers. Say I want a lawyer to go to court for a trafic ticket. How do I find out how much it will cost for a lawyer? I bet that if I called around thew would all be the same. I know they arent. The best of the lawyers charge a hell of a lot more per day to show up in court for you than the cheapest do. And that's still not a monopoly, there are lots of lawyers to choose from and you are free to show up in court without one too. And I did just that myself over a speeding fine and did fine without one. The medical schools only let in so many people each year to be doctors and nurses. I remember when the machines to 'blast' the kindey stones first came out. They would not let the local hospital have one because it would make the treatment cost come down due to competition. That's illegal here and there have be prosecutions of operations doing that. It isnt even legal to tell anyone what price they have to sell your product for either. |
#90
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
wrote in message ... 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. That's a lie with Office alone, let alone the Xbox etc. And didn't happen with Windows either. 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. That's very arguable. IBM wanted to get things done quickly with the PC and that's the reason they took a completely different approach with that product and were silly enough to have the full circuit diagrams and the bios code in the manual so it was trivial if not legal to clone it. They would still be a business machine, priced out of the reach of most consumers, like the PS/2 was. But that wasn't because of the anti trust suits. It was due to how IBM chose to do the PC. |
#91
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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... 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. That is only partof the story. Yes. GAtes and a company called something like Digital Research were in competition. Yes. Gates out smarted DR. He asked IBM to put out both and let the public choose. DR sold the system for about $ 150 and MS for $ 49. People being what they are bought mostly the $ 49 version. That mangles the real story. DR, and yes you got the name right, didn't both to show up when IBM asked them what they had to offer for the PC. Gates did and IBM chose what he had to be shipped for the PC and that's what most buyers got by default. And they didn't pay for it explicitly in the sense that it was an option with the DR product when buying the PC from IBM. That gave MS a big start money wise. The fact that it was what was shipped with the PC certainly was. There was a couple of other operating systems out, but they never made a go of it. I am thinking maybe DR. DOS MS sort of stole the windows design Nope. and the mouse from other companies. Nothing was stolen about the mouse. |
#92
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
wrote in message ... 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 the 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 There are in fact **** all of those. and those people get ****ed. The government makes it too easy for drug companies to extend patents. Yes, but thats a separate issue to monopolys. You are free to have your own patented drug for a particular medical problem and that is in fact what happens with all but a tiny handful of medical conditions and in fact lots of off patent drugs too. 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 other drug companys are free to do that with your original drug too. 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 No it wasnt. IBM chose to hive off what it decided werent profitable for them anymore. And its not alone in doing that, Samsung does it too. 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. Yes, but thats just changing how they did business, not imposed by any govt action. IBM did that with the PC too, decided to do it quite differently to how they had done things up till that time, to get it to market much quicker than the usual laborious way they did things with low end products like the IBM 5100 Hewlett Packard did the same thing with breaking themselves up into very different parts of the whole. It was in fact a rather fashionable approach at one time. They were not even using common parts or software and the people lived in separate worlds. Yes, but that happened with AT&T too, and not driven by govt action. Its just one way of doing business with operations that large. Seagate did it too, keeping quite independent hard drive operations going far longer than most, mostly the result of taking over other hard drive manufacturers like Conner and Samsung's hard drive operations. 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 Thats a lie with so much of their very fundamental scientific research. And the invention of the transistor in spades. it's bottom line and they were doing just fine providing POTS service. Why change? They did lots of very fundamental scientific research because they chose to. They never did much with their innovations with the personal computer because they didnt have the vision to see where the world was heading. DEC didnt either even tho it had turned the industry on its head with minis and later the vax etc. 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. |
#93
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
wrote in message ... On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 05:40:48 -0800 (PST), trader_4 wrote: On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 12:19:58 AM UTC-5, wrote: On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 15:36:47 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message .. . On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 07:33:23 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message ... On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 06:23:47 -0800 (PST), trader_4 wrote: On Thursday, February 7, 2019 at 7:09:47 PM UTC-5, wrote: On Thu, 7 Feb 2019 15:09:46 -0800 (PST), trader_4 wrote: On Thursday, February 7, 2019 at 5:20:53 PM UTC-5, Oren wrote: On Thu, 07 Feb 2019 16:45:58 -0500, wrote: On Thu, 7 Feb 2019 16:15:36 -0500, Ed Pawlowski wrote: On 2/7/2019 2:35 PM, George wrote: Socialist Ocasio-Kotex makes Al Gore proud! https://www.marke****ch.com/story/pe...eam-2019-02-07 I like this comment. Should be simple if you want to live in the dark Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Markey are aiming to eliminate the U.S. carbon footprint by 2030. This is how dumb AOC is. The Green New Deal would be paid for the same way we paid for the original New Deal, World War II, the bank bailouts, tax cuts for the rich and decades of war with public money appropriated by Congress, Ocasio-Cortez said. We can't even raise the taxes to pay the government's bills now. We are borrowing close to a trillion a year. Let's see how it works for the democrats if they want to raise taxes enough to pay for the "Green Deal". We are all going to drown in debt long before sea level rise gets anyone Her mother should have taught her: "money doesn't grow on trees". She doesn't think it grows on trees. She says it's in the hands of the rich and she wants to redistribute it. The problem is that people overestimate how much money the rich have compared to a $20 trillion dollar debt or even the trillion dollar annual deficit. A huge part of the problem is people think unrealized capital gains are wealth. And another problem is that people like her claim that it's unfair that the founder of a company is worth a billion, while the lowest employees are only making $30K. It would be nice if those making $30K were making $40K or $50K instead. The problem is that the govt taking the rich guy's billion, running it into the govt coffers, then ****ing it away on moon beams or people who just don't want to work, doesn't get those workers a $50K salary either. A good, thriving economy with low unemployment is a better way of raising their salaries. I'd be willing to at least look at other ideas to try to raise earnings overall, but taking all the money of the rich, stuffing it into govt and silly socialist ideas, just produces another Venezuela. The money some CEOs make is the symptom of a much larger problem. There are far fewer companies controlling far larger portions of the marketplace. Perhaps a better measure of CEO pay would be the company gross and market share. People who control monopolies tend to make a lot of money. We haven't really tried to do anything about monopolies since the Nixon administration. There are no current monopolys, just some very successful operations. Bull****. We'll see... I would start with the drug companies By definition, if there is more than one, it isnt a monopoly. There are monopolies in whole classes of drugs. If you need a particular drug to survive and only one company can sell it, he can charge what ever he wants. Segue from allegation of "whole classes", to an individual drug, noted. That a given company has a sole sourced product does not make that company or even that product a monopoly. For the vast majority of drugs, there are competitors and alternate drugs. "Your money or your life". There is also collusion and price fixing among companies that are supposed to be competing with each other. If you have proof of that, contact the DOJ, I'm sure they will be very interested. No they aren't The DoJ hasn't pursued an anti trust case successfully since the lie sure suit fell out of fashion. but in the US most cable TV companies are monopolies in their areas But only in their area, not the entire country. So what? If you live. there it is still a monopoly and unlike what Trader says, there is virtually any regulation of these monopolies. and Comcast is a monster owning entertainment from the studio to the set top box and everything in between. Still not a monopoly given that you are free to stream off the net etc. If the cable company is also the only real net provider, you are still stuck. Microsoft is also a monopoly by the definition used when the broke up the phone company and IBM in the 70s. IBM never had a monopoly The US department of justice had a different opinion, both in 1956 when they were initially throttled and again 1968 when the DOJ filed another suit. And then the DOJ dropped the case. Because IBM had already done everything they sought in the case It was broken up into several individual operating units actively competing with each other. and neither did Microsoft. Yes they did if you used the same guideline the DoJ used in the 50s and 60s. (based on market share alone) I would agree with that assessment. MSFT certainly has market power at least as great as what IBM had in the 70s. Innovation exploded when that happened. Irrelevant to whether it had a monopoly or not. It didnt. When the phone company had a monopoly, there was virtually any innovation. Without unbundling the phone lines there would have never been a consumer grade modem and no internet for one thing. When the telco had a monopoly you couldn't even buy a telephone. you had to rent it from them. It was illegal to hook up your own even if you could buy one. Once the phone system was unbundled prices plunged too. I pay less now in 2019 dollars for a land line than I did in 1975 dollars then. My bill was typically $35 in 75 depending on how many distance calls I made. That is about $135 in 2019 dollars My bill now is less than $30 for my landline with free long distance. Agree with the above too. AT&T had a total lock on the whole thing, end to end. It's the best example of a real monopoly and what happens. But there definitely was innovation at AT&T. They excelled at pure research, that's where the transistor was invented that's inside everything from your phone to your car. They developed lighwave communication and were already deploying that, which became the backbone of the internet. They developed cell phone technology, both for the phones and the land side. Along the way they won numerous Noble prizes, including for finding the radiation in space that proved the bing bang theory of the universe. But there is no question that the free market, with many companies competing, sure drove what they started into the hands of the world at low prices better and faster than they could ever achieve. All of AT&T was stuck in a monopoly mindset that they could not shake. That ultimately led to the downfall of Bell Labs and Lucent, they just coudn't learn how to compete. AT&T certainly had Bell Labs but they were not interested in giving the customer anything new. Thats a lie with tone dialling and dialling for yourself alone. They just wanted to make POTS as profitable as they could. Thats a lie with Bell Labs alone. Elliott Ness would recognize the phones we had in 1978 and the only thing that might surprise him is touch tone and that the Princess phone had a light in it. It took them 50 years to give us a phone that wasn't black. The only major change in all of that time was touch tone and that was for them not us. Bull**** on that last. It was really designed for inter trunk switching of long distance calls and it was just an after thought that it got into the phone itself. Again it was mostly to save them money on operators, just like the dial phone.. But the addition of tone dialling didnt. |
#94
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 06:10:48 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote: wrote in message .. . 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. That's a lie with Office alone, let alone the Xbox etc. And didn't happen with Windows either. There are a lot of features in office that were derived from things he bought like Consumer Software co that gave him a lot of Excel and Fox that contributed to Access. He bought a half dozen companies to get the 3d technology in your Xbox The pattern was simple., If he saw a product he would have to compete with it, he just bought them out. 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. That's very arguable. IBM wanted to get things done quickly with the PC and that's the reason they took a completely different approach with that product and were silly enough to have the full circuit diagrams and the bios code in the manual so it was trivial if not legal to clone it. IBM was being very careful not to get itself back in Anti-Trust trouble. The 1969 case had just been dismissed but the DoJ was still filing motions. They wanted the PC to be an open architecture product to get wide acceptance with a 3d party software vendor available to avoid the "bundling" issue that got them in trouble in the 60s. It was a legal decision more than a business one. They did have a proprietary system and software (PS/2 and OS/2) but that was really only aimed at IBM business customers and not actively marketed to the consumer. They would still be a business machine, priced out of the reach of most consumers, like the PS/2 was. But that wasn't because of the anti trust suits. It was due to how IBM chose to do the PC. They gave the PC business away to establish the x86 standard and pave the way for their proprietary machine. Although most people seldom ever saw a PS/2 except on TV, it was very successful for IBM in the business world. The goal was to replace every dumb terminal with a PS/2 and that was very successful. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
wrote in message ... 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 the 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 No it isnt. Half of my mates have only a cellphone service for their broadband. Costs less than my broadband service. The only real difference is that mine is unlimited and theirs is limited to 50GB or so, but that just means its not so good if you are into streaming video content. Its fine for everything else. and still 4G or even 3G in some places. 4G works fine. 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'
wrote in message ... 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 the 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. There are no drug company monopolys, they compete with each other very aggressively indeed. 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'
"Ralph Mowery" wrote in message k.net... In article , says... 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. Gates did not buy DOS from DR. They were compeating companies. DR sold their system for about $ 150 or $ 250 and MS for $ 49. People went to the less expensive system. In fact you got the MS OS by default with a PC and could buy the alternative if you wanted to and few bothered to do that. Gates bought the operating system from another company and licensed the use to IBM. It was a very smart move for MS. They do not really sell their products, but license the use of them. I have not kept up with it but I am thinking that now they have an even better way of keeping making money. Their Office 365 (or what ever it is called now ) has to be renewed every year. Correct, and that's why MS has returned to be the most valuable company, topping Apple again. For most home users, a very eirly version of Office is all that is needed. I would not have a Windows 10 computer except that Turobo tax quit running under Windows XP. I do not use the operating system except to load in programs I want to run. I cold care less about all the things Win 10 is suppose to do vers XP. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
wrote in message ... On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 06:10:48 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message . .. 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. That's a lie with Office alone, let alone the Xbox etc. And didn't happen with Windows either. There are a lot of features in office that were derived from things he bought like Consumer Software co that gave him a lot of Excel and Fox that contributed to Access. Yes, but office isnt just a better product bought from a competitor. And you mangled the story with excel. He bought a half dozen companies to get the 3d technology in your Xbox That mangles the real story too. The pattern was simple., If he saw a product he would have to compete with it, he just bought them out. That isnt true of any of Office, Xbox, Windows etc. Or networking either. 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. That's very arguable. IBM wanted to get things done quickly with the PC and that's the reason they took a completely different approach with that product and were silly enough to have the full circuit diagrams and the bios code in the manual so it was trivial if not legal to clone it. IBM was being very careful not to get itself back in Anti-Trust trouble. That wasn't the reason they chose a completely different approach to doing the PC with a completely independent operation within IBM. And wasn't the reason they bought the OS from Gates either. The 1969 case had just been dismissed but the DoJ was still filing motions. They wanted the PC to be an open architecture product to get wide acceptance with a 3d party software vendor available to avoid the "bundling" issue that got them in trouble in the 60s. And yet they changed their mind on that approach with the PS/2. It was a legal decision more than a business one. Bull**** with the PC, that was done for other reasons, the very laborious long winded approach that was endemic in IBM at that time which wouldn't have worked with what needed to be big step away from the way IBM did things prior to that. They did have a proprietary system and software (PS/2 and OS/2) but that was really only aimed at IBM business customers That mangles the real story too with the PCjr etc. and not actively marketed to the consumer. Pity about the stuff they flogged thru retail consumer markets long after it made any sense to do that stuff. They would still be a business machine, priced out of the reach of most consumers, like the PS/2 was. But that wasn't because of the anti trust suits. It was due to how IBM chose to do the PC. They gave the PC business away to establish the x86 standard and pave the way for their proprietary machine. That's bull**** too with the AT etc. Although most people seldom ever saw a PS/2 except on TV, That's bull**** too with the PCjr. it was very successful for IBM in the business world. No it wasn't. It didn't dominate the business world. The goal was to replace every dumb terminal with a PS/2 and that was very successful. It did nothing of the sort. And the 3270 was nothing even remotely like a dumb terminal either. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
On 02/09/2019 08:48 AM, Ralph Mowery wrote:
GAtes and a company called something like Digital Research were in competition. Gates out smarted DR. He asked IBM to put out both and let the public choose. DR sold the system for about $ 150 and MS for $ 49. People being what they are bought mostly the $ 49 version. That's one of the biggest 'he said, she said' events in the history of personal computers. Gates was going to license his BASIC interpreter to IBM but did not have an OS so he referred IBM to Kildall (Digital Research) IBM reps met with DRI. Here it becomes cloudy. Kildall blew the meeting off, his wife refused to sign a NDA, Kildall wouldn't sign an NDA, pick you favorite rumor. Anyway IBM went home empty handed. Gates licensed and then bought 86-DOS from Seattle Computing and jumped into the breach. Further complexity: IBM cheaped out and used the 8088 with an 8 bit data buss rather than a real 8086, so SCP had to tweak 86-DOS to use the 8088's memory management, which was essentially the bank switching scheme that was already being used for the 8080. The 8088 was a 8080 on steroids while Intel worked on their real product, the 432, which was a failure. DR's CP/M for the 8080/Z80 was very popular and well documented. SCP certainly didn't do a clean room implementation of 86-DOS but there's a point where when you're using a processor with almost the same architecture and the same hardware interrupts you're going to wind up with the same sort of code. Plus, CP/M was so popular, IBM wanted it to look and feel like CP/M. Personally, I was mostly working with the Z80 variant of the 8080 at the time and was looking at the Z8000 as the next step, although I did have a 68000 development board in case that won the race. The whole 8088/8086 family was a disappointment. As another quirk, Exxon owned Zilog and was in a ****ing contest with IBM so the Z8000 wasn't even a contender. Motorola had sort of a bad rep of going off on a tangent of making 20 zillion parts for automotive applications and hanging you out to dry if you were a low volume customer that had designed in one of their devices. Kildall didn't do that bad although he died young. Even that is cloudy but involved a biker bar, alcohol, and a severe head injury. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
On 02/09/2019 08:35 AM, Ralph Mowery wrote:
The medical schools only let in so many people each year to be doctors and nurses. I remember when the machines to 'blast' the kindey stones first came out. They would not let the local hospital have one because it would make the treatment cost come down due to competition. It varies by the state but the nurse practitioners have been lobbying to be allowed to practice independently across the board and that's meeting resistance. I have a yearly wellness physical coming up and a NP certainly could handle that. In fact, when my doctor was on maternity leave, the NP did. Still, many states require that they are under the supervision of a doctor. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'greendream'
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 10:48:16 AM UTC-5, wrote:
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 Imagine that. I suppose you would? But it's irrelevant because Gates didn't buy his OS from Digital Research. He bought it from their competitor, Seattle Computer Products. That was after IBM had first tried to negotiate a deal with Gary Kildall and they failed to reach an agreement. Kildall CP/M bore a remarkable resemblance to ISIS, an Intel operating system for their development systems, where Kildall was employed as a consutant. and most of his "innovation" since then was also from simply buying a better package from a competitor. Nonsense. 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. More nonsense. IBM was under no constraint that would have prevented them from buying whatever they wanted to. You make the mistake of thinking that IBM was clairvoyant and had a great plan for what the personal computer was going to become. Actually, they were taking a flyer on mostly a lark, tossing it out to see what would happen and they were as surprised as anyone at the results. 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. There was no anti-trust reqt that PCs be unbundled. Again, the govt dropped the suit, there was no consent decree, IBM didn't agree to anything. Now did it make IBM more cautious and careful regarding pricing or anything that could bring another govt suit, sure. But the PC rolled out in 1981, Reagan ruled, and they had 12 years of a very friendly govt and business environment. A govt that wasn't going to screw with success. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 11:14:53 AM UTC-5, wrote:
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 the 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. There is a whole range of drugs between non-essential drugs for baldness and orphan drugs that only treat a few thousand patients. And I don't see those people as ****ed. Would you rather they die than the drug companies offer an expensive drug that it cost them $2 bil to develop? In many cases, if the govt or insurance won't pay for it, the drug company reduces the price significantly or gives it away free. 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 Do you speak for all states in the union, or just FL? Given that FL has laws that allow a known nut that has had 21 police calls to his house to walk into Dick's and buy all the guns and ammo he wants, maybe you don't regulate the cable services there, including the rates they can charge, but most states, including NJ, do. https://www.nj.gov/bpu/about/faq/ Q. What is regulated by the BPU? A. The BPU regulates over electric, gas, water, telecommunication, and cable in the state of New Jersey. The BPU has a statutory mandate to ensure safe, adequate and proper utility services at reasonable rates for customers in New Jersey. Q. What utility aspects does the BPU regulate? A. The BPU monitors the rates, charges, rules and regulations of most electric, natural gas, water, cable and telecommunication utilities operating within the state of New Jersey. And ultimately, any community here can kick out a cable operator, refuse to renew their franchise or allow another cable company in to compete. In some areas of NJ that is happening, with Verizon and Cablevision beating each other's brains out. Are they as heavily regulated as the electric company? I'd say no, for example I don't think they regulate the prices for premium channels, but they do regulate the prices for basic cable service and the fees for equipment rental. 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. Maybe in your dreams. Show us the link to this big breakup. What were the new companies called and how many shares of stock did each IBM investor get? It never happened. A couple decades later, IBM chose to sell off it's PC business, but that sure isn't a break up of IBM and coming two decades after the end of the dropping of the antitrust case, it sure isn't attributable to that. Sure, IBM has done some restructuring, it had it's own crisis, driven by the markets, but it was not a breakup of the compaany. separate operating units that were actively competing with each other Nonsense. That's like saying the operating units at any large company "compete" 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 That's pure BS. AT&T spent a fortune on pure research. You don't win Nobel prizes in physics focusing on the bottom line. Are you trying to tell us that right after WWII, AT&T knew that the transistor was going to improve their bottom line? That would be some very remarkable clairvoyance. AT&T stands out way above most companies in that respect. The transistor, proving the big bang theory correct, is way beyond what 99% of companies do in the way of research. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 1:07:12 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 10:48:00 -0500, Ralph Mowery wrote: In article , says... 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. That is only partof the story. GAtes and a company called something like Digital Research were in competition. Gates out smarted DR. He asked IBM to put out both and let the public choose. DR sold the system for about $ 150 and MS for $ 49. People being what they are bought mostly the $ 49 version. That gave MS a big start money wise. There was a couple of other operating systems out,but they never made a go of it. I am thinking maybe DR. DOS DR DOS was Digital Research (the DR part) and that is where Gates got DOS in the first place. Both were derivatives of CPM. That is incorrect. Gates bought a similar OS from Seattle Computer Associates. And that was after IBM had tried to negotiate a deal with Digital Research. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 2:45:38 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 06:10:48 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message .. . 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. That's a lie with Office alone, let alone the Xbox etc. And didn't happen with Windows either. There are a lot of features in office that were derived from things he bought like Consumer Software co that gave him a lot of Excel and Fox that contributed to Access. He bought a half dozen companies to get the 3d technology in your Xbox The pattern was simple., If he saw a product he would have to compete with it, he just bought them out. 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. That's very arguable. IBM wanted to get things done quickly with the PC and that's the reason they took a completely different approach with that product and were silly enough to have the full circuit diagrams and the bios code in the manual so it was trivial if not legal to clone it. IBM was being very careful not to get itself back in Anti-Trust trouble. The 1969 case had just been dismissed but the DoJ was still filing motions. They wanted the PC to be an open architecture product to get wide acceptance with a 3d party software vendor available to avoid the "bundling" issue that got them in trouble in the 60s. It was a legal decision more than a business one. They did have a proprietary system and software (PS/2 and OS/2) but that was really only aimed at IBM business customers and not actively marketed to the consumer. They would still be a business machine, priced out of the reach of most consumers, like the PS/2 was. But that wasn't because of the anti trust suits. It was due to how IBM chose to do the PC. They gave the PC business away to establish the x86 standard and pave the way for their proprietary machine. Although most people seldom ever saw a PS/2 except on TV, it was very successful for IBM in the business world. The goal was to replace every dumb terminal with a PS/2 and that was very successful. You are operating under the delusion that big old IBM, which should be a dumb monopoly like AT&T if I follow you, somehow could see the whole future of the computer industry in 1981 when they took a flyer on a PC when no one at the time could even figure out why anyone needed one or what they would do with it. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 06:36:41 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote: wrote in message .. . 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 the 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 There are in fact **** all of those. and those people get ****ed. The government makes it too easy for drug companies to extend patents. Yes, but thats a separate issue to monopolys. You are free to have your own patented drug for a particular medical problem and that is in fact what happens with all but a tiny handful of medical conditions and in fact lots of off patent drugs too. 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 other drug companys are free to do that with your original drug too. I don't know about OZ but in the US, the original drug's patent gets extended, it isn't a new patent. 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 No it wasnt. IBM chose to hive off what it decided werent profitable for them anymore. And its not alone in doing that, Samsung does it too. 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. Yes, but thats just changing how they did business, not imposed by any govt action. IBM did that with the PC too, decided to do it quite differently to how they had done things up till that time, to get it to market much quicker than the usual laborious way they did things with low end products like the IBM 5100 Hewlett Packard did the same thing with breaking themselves up into very different parts of the whole. It was in fact a rather fashionable approach at one time. They were not even using common parts or software and the people lived in separate worlds. Yes, but that happened with AT&T too, and not driven by govt action. Its just one way of doing business with operations that large. Seagate did it too, keeping quite independent hard drive operations going far longer than most, mostly the result of taking over other hard drive manufacturers like Conner and Samsung's hard drive operations. 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 Thats a lie with so much of their very fundamental scientific research. And the invention of the transistor in spades. it's bottom line and they were doing just fine providing POTS service. Why change? They did lots of very fundamental scientific research because they chose to. They never did much with their innovations with the personal computer because they didnt have the vision to see where the world was heading. DEC didnt either even tho it had turned the industry on its head with minis and later the vax etc. 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 Sun, 10 Feb 2019 06:36:41 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote: IBM was broken up tho No it wasnt. IBM chose to hive off what it decided werent profitable for them anymore. Not true at all IBM split off 7 sectors of it's company into 7 separate operating units and it wasn't until the 90s that they actually started selling them off. The thinking was if the government actually did win and they were forced to break up, they already would be broken up. Those sectors were totally independent of each other and actually bought and sold things between each other. The reality was the products were so dissimilar, developed separately and manufactured separately so there was not much in common to swap back and forth. In fact in the early 90s when they merged them back together, there was virtually no economy of scale since virtually none of the hardware or software were interchangeable and the training was pretty useless across those platforms too. They had totally different cultures. IBM corporate was just operating as a holding company, at least in the bookkeeping. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
wrote in message ... On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 06:36:41 +1100, "Rod Speed" wrote: wrote in message . .. 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 the 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 There are in fact **** all of those. and those people get ****ed. The government makes it too easy for drug companies to extend patents. Yes, but thats a separate issue to monopolys. You are free to have your own patented drug for a particular medical problem and that is in fact what happens with all but a tiny handful of medical conditions and in fact lots of off patent drugs too. 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 other drug companys are free to do that with your original drug too. I don't know about OZ but in the US, the original drug's patent gets extended, it isn't a new patent. You were there one the claimed a whole new patent. 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 No it wasnt. IBM chose to hive off what it decided werent profitable for them anymore. And its not alone in doing that, Samsung does it too. 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. Yes, but thats just changing how they did business, not imposed by any govt action. IBM did that with the PC too, decided to do it quite differently to how they had done things up till that time, to get it to market much quicker than the usual laborious way they did things with low end products like the IBM 5100 Hewlett Packard did the same thing with breaking themselves up into very different parts of the whole. It was in fact a rather fashionable approach at one time. They were not even using common parts or software and the people lived in separate worlds. Yes, but that happened with AT&T too, and not driven by govt action. Its just one way of doing business with operations that large. Seagate did it too, keeping quite independent hard drive operations going far longer than most, mostly the result of taking over other hard drive manufacturers like Conner and Samsung's hard drive operations. 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 Thats a lie with so much of their very fundamental scientific research. And the invention of the transistor in spades. it's bottom line and they were doing just fine providing POTS service. Why change? They did lots of very fundamental scientific research because they chose to. They never did much with their innovations with the personal computer because they didnt have the vision to see where the world was heading. DEC didnt either even tho it had turned the industry on its head with minis and later the vax etc. 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 Sun, 10 Feb 2019 06:42:26 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote: wrote in message AT&T certainly had Bell Labs but they were not interested in giving the customer anything new. Thats a lie with tone dialling and dialling for yourself alone. They just wanted to make POTS as profitable as they could. Thats a lie with Bell Labs alone. Elliott Ness would recognize the phones we had in 1978 and the only thing that might surprise him is touch tone and that the Princess phone had a light in it. It took them 50 years to give us a phone that wasn't black. The only major change in all of that time was touch tone and that was for them not us. Bull**** on that last. It was really designed for inter trunk switching of long distance calls and it was just an after thought that it got into the phone itself. Again it was mostly to save them money on operators, just like the dial phone.. But the addition of tone dialling didnt. Tone dialing was originally invented to allow nation wide automatic switching of inner city trunks. By extending that to the phone they automated direct dial long distance and got rid of the long distance operator. It was the same way the rotary dial got rid of the regular operators. It was all about cutting labor cost and charging you extra for it. As an added bonus touch dialing shortened the time you were using the Originating Register in the switch so they didn't need as many of them. This was about saving money, no more no less. It was also the main driver for electronic switching. When Sprint bought the Ft Myers TelCo, got rid of their #5 Crossbar switch and went to ESS they went from 6-7 guys running around across 2 floors of a big building cleaning relays and running jumper wires to 2 computer racks and 1 big wiring hub that never changes. There was one guy sitting at the console drinking coffee and a bunch of people laid off. The "Frame Hops" (switchmen) went from 15 to 4 or 5 as fast as the union would let them. The 3d floor and half of the 2d floor was empty and leased out as office space. It was all about the money, |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 06:48:37 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote: There are no drug company monopolys, they compete with each other very aggressively indeed. Not in drugs they have patents on and it is far too easy in the US to extend a patent. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 15:09:22 -0700, rbowman wrote:
There must still be money in big iron which is where IBM always was most comfortable. I worked with a guy from Boulder in the early 90s and he said mainframes were going to become file servers, nothing more nothing less. That is pretty much what IBM sells now. We call it the cloud these days but it is pretty much what the Boulder, Raleigh, Atlanta and the other big IBM data hubs were then. Once we had PCs on our desk I found it a lot easier to log onto VM, use SQL/DB2 to cherry pick a dataset, download it and use dBase to actually crunch my numbers. It seemed faster even on a 20m 386 and the dBase language was more powerful than SQL. I was running pure DOS on an OS/2 (hardware) machine so I had 12 meg of RAM to spare. I could load my whole dataset in RAM and crunch it there. That really screams. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 15:20:32 -0700, rbowman wrote:
On 02/09/2019 10:33 AM, wrote: Yeah $100 for a widget that costs about a quarter to make injecting a drug that has been around for a half a century ... sweet A guy at work is diabetic and I was shocked at what he pays for insulin. My wife was diabetic but I don't remember what we paid. That's not a statement about my fading memory but the fact the cost was so low it's like asking me what we paid for a bottle of aspirin in 1971. That is an excellent example of a 75 (100?) year old drug that they are raping people over. |
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Pelosi calls Ocasio-Cortez's 'new deal' climate plan a 'green dream'
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 15:38:45 -0700, rbowman wrote:
On 02/09/2019 08:35 AM, Ralph Mowery wrote: The medical schools only let in so many people each year to be doctors and nurses. I remember when the machines to 'blast' the kindey stones first came out. They would not let the local hospital have one because it would make the treatment cost come down due to competition. It varies by the state but the nurse practitioners have been lobbying to be allowed to practice independently across the board and that's meeting resistance. I have a yearly wellness physical coming up and a NP certainly could handle that. In fact, when my doctor was on maternity leave, the NP did. Still, many states require that they are under the supervision of a doctor. I have a new "Doctor" and I have had 3 visits without ever even seeing the guy. Two techs are all I have ever seen. For all I know this is a weekend at Bernie's thing, he died a year ago and they are still cashing his checks. I have actually heard this is not unusual. The other doctor who used to at least come in and look at you for a minute is a "Concierge" now and you have to pay him to join his club. |
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