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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend Matt Stoller's book 'Goliath' about the 100 year battle between US democracy and monopoly. Also his current newsletter 'big' which brings the book up to date for what is happening right now. https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-to-structure-the-coro... Forget 'rainy day' funds - the vast majority of modern businesses are financialized ATMs to pull value out of massively leveraged assets to distribute to a tiny percent of humanity. Airlines are a good example of this. They'll get bailed out but hopefully there will be some guard rails put in place to prevent these funds going to pay for shareholder executive jets and yachts

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Honestly, if you look at the FAANGs as well, possibly the most successful current businesses, 2 out of the 5 are just ad dependent. If there was a new revolutionary method of as delivery that supplanted mobile/web, then Google and Facebook would basically go the way of print media, but worse, because print media at least bought some time by being 50% ads and 50% subscriptions usually.

I don’t understand Amazon so I can’t really comment on it.

Netflix would probably do fine.

Apple would also likely do fine overall, but growth would reduce. It remains to be seen if the slowing growth would lead them to throw away what’s made them successful.

Now that the tide is out we'll see who is swimming naked.

That's obvious bullshit, given that most modern businesses provide actual value to people.

Like an airline: people can hop on planes and go to places, to do business or meet people.

You can't do that with an ATM. ATMs don't fly.

All successful businesses provide value to succeed and survive, that's a given. The problem is that ever since the 80's junk bond era corrupt business people take over companies to load them with debt and extract financial assets.

And how does that supposedly work? Why do shareholders go along with it?

And what is stopping people from creating businesses that don't do that?

It sounds much like a conspiracy theory to me. The mysterious world of finance that everybody just know to be evil.

I don't doubt that shady things happen. But there has to be a better explanation than "evil businessmen extract value". And how is it "extracting", when people get actual services in return? If I buy an apple at a supermarket, has the supermarket extracted money from me?

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