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Comment by bluedevil2k | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be so dismissive of dealers by simply saying "They will lose." The most important thing in American politics is power, and power comes from money (sounds like that comes directly from House of Cards). The article points out that the car dealer lobby is well funded and powerful. It even points out that they are exempt from the Consumer Protection laws, meaning they don't have to disclose the awful interest rates they are offering (which surprised me). Look at the size of a company like AutoNation ($6.3B market cap). They aren't a local mom and pop car dealer. Never underestimate the fight of a wounded animal backed into a corner.

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The most important thing in American politics is power, and power comes from money

Since most American legislators come from a legal background, the culture of national politics has this world view. Chinese leadership is majority engineering, so at least they have some sense that physics isn't impressed dollars and poll results.

Sorry, but when you use the example of a repressive, communist regime that gives its people hardly any freedoms at all as an example of a better way of running a governmentyou kind of lose credibility.

Not to mention the fact that China seems the be having a massive problem with official corruption. In fact, China's official corruption problem is arguably worse than America's. At least our politicians are bought with campaign dollars. It appears that Chinese politicians and bureaucrats are bought with direct payments.

My point is not that the Chinese gov't is better than we thought, nor that it's better in an absolute sense than the US gov't. My point is that the US gov't is worse than how we've been thinking of it.

Hm, I've read your comment several more times and it still plainly reads to me that you are arguing that China's leadership, being engineers, have a better grasp of the futility of being corrupt... and since the United States is led by lawyers then corruption is to be expected.

In short, we should expect the United States to be corrupt because of lawyers and China to be not corrupt because of engineers, and I'm just saying that's the opposite of the truth.

I really don't care all that much, I'm just really curious now why you bothered to mention China at all if what you were trying to say was that the US is worse than we thought.

So less than half the purchase price of WhatsApp? These are the deep pocketed interests on the other side of the battle?

Don't confuse market cap and purchase price. And I would never use Facebook's ridiculous overpayment as the basis for valuing other companies.

Purchase price should be in general a small premium over market cap.

It should be, but the actual premium is the result of a human decision, and humans sometimes make very bad decisions. (See, for instance, the purchase of Skype by eBay a decade ago. Also on the value of a network that was an alternative to phone calls.)

Market cap is also the result of human decision.

A single human decision generally has higher variance than a group one. (Not to say that group ones are always reliable.)

eBay made approx 1.4 billion net gain from buying then selling Skype - see http://investor.ebayinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=8296...

"In May 2011, all of the equity in Skype was sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion. Due to eBay's 30% stake at the time of sale, the company realized a net gain of $1.4 billion on its original investment in Skype."

That's one of many such companies.

It's simpler than that, though. On a local level, away from the large cities, it's not uncommon for the guy or gal that owns (not necessarily the same as the name is on the sign though) the local dealership to be the area's state senator or state representative. No amount of lobbying or money from tesla, etc, are going to convince him to vote against his/her own business.

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