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Comment by tomkin | Hacker News Reader

Why does it need to grow? Maybe growth is limited, and when it's not, it's dangerous.

You have to give shareholders a return through stock growth or through dividends.

Mega-companies will only ever end up eventually creating a G+. 300 smaller companies each doing a few things well. That is true growth.

Every time you use the word "growth" to describe "success", you will find that you only have new mouths to feed.

That's patently false. Pun intended. Innovation is not limited to startups. Underneath the hood, there's an absolutely massive amount of r&d and innovation that goes into Intel's chips year on year. Google's progress in machine learning for speech and photos is impressive. The big companies often do very well innovating. Intel producing another innovation that drives a billion dollars of sales isn't as exciting as a startup doing the same, but both are real.

You're talking about the economy in a "Plinko chip" sort of way, and I'm talking about community building. If you want good products and a well paying society, you need to promote more individual nodes rather than giant motherships. And by "promote", I mean actually want it instead of talking about how the rules apply to the current system.

And if something is patently false I shouldn't be able to point to hundreds of examples where you're wrong.

You don't need to grow to provide a decent dividend to shareholders. You just need to reliably produce a profit. If your dividend represents an acceptable ROI it doesn't particularly matter if you are not growing.

Of course having a good dividend AND capital growth would be desirable but shareholders won't complain too loud about a company that just spits out dividends year after year.

Apple's trying to keep people happy, but they keep freaking out.

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