notSupplied

EU anti-trust takes harm to competing business into account, but American anti-trust is totally focused on consumer harm, and specifically harm from higher prices.

So unsurprisingly, American tech monopolies are usually middleman-monopolies that offer low (often free) prices while squeezing businesses on the other side. Facebook/Google sells the user as the product, while Amazon is GREAT for low prices, but not so great, and sometimes ruinous for the sellers.

States and cities competing to undercut each other in offering sweet deals for Amazon HQs and sports team stadiums had always felt extremely wrong to me. If anything has a natural right to behave like a cartel when negotiating against businesses, it is municipal and state governments.

What happens when the party you borrowed the stock from, seeing the new high price, wants to sell it to cash in on the fever? Can they not force close the position if the price moved up by some threshold?

Actually, that’s pretty much what Douglas Hofstadter has been trying to explain in GEB and I am a Strange Loop.

You’re talking about rising purchasing power, which is better achieved through rising income than deflating currency.

The “the percent of protests that are peaceful” largely depends on what you decide to include in that category.

Suppose the peaceful portion of BLM protests didn’t happen, would the violent riots go from being justified to unjust? Why would the presence of the peaceful protests change our moral assessment of the violent ones? Same with the MAGA demonstrations. It should not matter that there were numerous other peaceful MAGA rallies when assessing the storming on the capital.

The difference between the "kill" taboo and "rape" taboo is: We have a narrative where killing is justified–Good guys killing bad guys–but we do not have a narrative where rape is justified.

Remember the controversy around the game "Hatred", where you play some random angry "antagonist" who just wants to kill innocent people? When the "good guy" narrative breaks down this far, society would reject violent video games as well.

There are games that toe the "good guy" line, most notably Grand Theft Auto. But GTA also has some of the most tame looking violence. I cannot imagine a GTA with the "sadistic gaze" of Mortal Kombat's finishers being widely accepted.

This is especially more palatable if non-humans on receiving the violence. There is strong interest in killing aliens/monsters/demons/robots, but I think it's safe to say there is comparatively little interest in having sex with them. I say "comparatively little" and not "none", because Rule 34.

If a landowner is having trouble making a profit on rent due to high mortgage costs, that just means that the wealth was captured by the previous owner via a high sale price. So the point still stands that a disproportionate amount of wealth is flowing to land instead of capital or labor.

Taxation to pay 1. “your fair share of the public commons”, which all big businesses benefit from, is very different from 2. taxation to reduce poverty, which is also different from 3. taxation to eliminate rich people.

Am I wrong in sensing that you believe in a bit of #3?

What if the warehouse workers outnumber the tech and managers 100:1? With >1 million employees, that ratio is likely pretty steep, in which case, even if all managers and tech workers were paid zero, it still wouldn’t move the needle for everyone else.

Say an engineer is working on Google’s ad platform. In an alternate universe, he is working at Bing, producing code of identical quality. The economic outcome of this identical unit of labor output is dramatically different.

That difference is attributed to the company, not the laborer. Now whether that is because of “monopolistic forces” or because the company is truly “better managed” is up for debate.

So just because your labor is worth $X to your employer doesn’t mean all of it can be attributed to you. It would be inaccurate to believe that they owe you exactly $X, and anything less would be exploitation.

Through foster children, and measuring whether their IQs are ultimately more correlated with their foster family or genetic family.

Communities are not monoliths. Otherwise, it would be incredibly easy to charge any sufficiently large community of blatant hypocrisy.

...and their silence about it only FURTHER proves there exists a mass conspiracy to muffle the voices for -some unpopular cause-

That presumes your view of fair will ultimately end up on the right side of history, just like the eventual abolition of slavery was. However that is not yet knowable at the present.

While you are focused on how your political view is the “right one”, @thegrimmest is more focused on how people should coexist when they all hold strong-but-different ideas of what is fair, and which of those will ultimately go down in history as ”moral progress” is yet unknown.

I have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already high enterprise value higher. The “maker:taker” opportunity ratio changes, and so does the type of personality the organization attracts.

Maybe they really really don't want professionals to buy the 1st gen M1 Macs, because we have the toughest use cases and will shit on it the hardest if something goes wrong. Lack of 32GB seems like a pretty clear signal.

The Mac has turned into a very nice luxury-consumer business. It is a status signal even if its just used to check email and watch YouTube. It's a pretty smart idea to let these users be the gen 1 guinea pigs.

It pains me to see that well-meaning people fail to do a basic pass on 2nd order effects of this tax:

- Since "high CEO pay" is defined as 100x multiple of average pay, the first unintended incentive is for companies to cut back on hiring low-end labor, or 1099/outsource so that they do not drag down the average pay. This directly harms the employment prospects of people at the bottom.

- If it succeeds in reducing CEO pay, it's not clear that the money is redistributed to other employees, as opposed retained to by the company as capital, or returned to shareholders. And not that this matters much. Even if you were to redistribute, say Bobby Kottick's $30M compensation, it would result in a net-gain of ~$270 per month per employee at Activision. That is assuming the CEO's pay goes to ZERO. If this tax only results in a net -10% change in CEO pay, it's actual economic benefit to other workers is a rounding error.

- This arbitrarily favors companies of certain structure vs others. For example, a VC firm or Law firm has an extremely high average pay, while any operation that likely involves "real economy" employs a legion of low-pay workers. The CEO of a large, meat-and-potatoes kind of operation is far more likely to be dinged by the 100x rule than the head of a high end professional partnership. Why are VC firms special in the eyes of this law?

Score voting results in tactical voting where only the most extreme scores are given, instead of revealing their "true preferences" on a grayscale. In fact, those who provide honest scores are disadvantaged, because the deciding-power of their vote would be lower than those who purposely exaggerate their scores to the extremes!

It works in situations where there are few voters and their votes are all publicly visible.

The remaining point of having states would be that local state law can still vary.

This is true even if we got rid of the senate, the EC, and every federal body had purely population-proportional representation (which I am in favor of).

As Apple makes their chips faster and more efficient and as phone batteries get bigger and bigger, app developers rise to meet the challenge by producing increasingly sloppy software that can afford to be incredibly wasteful because raw speed of the hardware is masking its cracks.

Try to run Instagram today on an iPhone 6, you won't be able to even scroll a feed of static images smoothly without hitching. Imagine what it is doing to the battery.

I am operating on an underlying principle that others may not share, but this could help elucidate why I disagree with many fellow liberals on this front:

I'm trying to solve for how decision making power is allocated without making assumptions about which side is right or wrong. In other words, the argument that "The company must do XYZ because this political cause is simply on the RIGHT side of history!" is not acceptable to me, even though I often personally agree that the cause really _is_ right.

I certainly agree that the mission of a company can (and preferably) be more than just for profit. However, "to be political" is still a pretty wide range of possible missions. Who calls the shots about what you're going to be political about, and which side you take? And when a group of employees disagree with the shots being called, what kinds of reactions are appropriate or not?

I'll take a shot: - I think compelled activism is inappropriate. You know, the "silence is violence" stuff. - I think expecting to have power to set a company's political agenda and expressing anger when you don't get your way is inappropriate. That power belongs to the board. Employment and stock-options are not "fractions of board seats".

When a group of employees demand that their employers engage in political activism, what they are asking for is the ability to commandeer the resources of the company, whether it be its reputation, money, or labor to advance their political objective. They want to amplify their impact beyond what they can accomplish with their personal resources. I wonder how these same people feel about the political contributions of companies from the opposing end of the spectrum. Would they say "Get corporate power out of politics!"?

Notion does a great job balancing the two. There is immense power hidden behind the slash commands. For everyone else, it's just a great note taking tool.

Therein lies the difference between "This is what I believe." vs "This is what I believe, and anyone who isn't actively fighting for my cause must be evil." None of us here can really know what Brian has done as a private citizen in terms of political activism. What would you think if he is privately active (maybe even for causes you agree with!) and also chooses the workplace to be politically neutral?

(Speaking of which, what have you done to fight the status quo? Why not more? Why have you not consumed all of your time/money/attention on it? What level is necessary to be considered not-complicit in the status quo?)

There could already be a majority agitated, disgruntled employees--those agitated and disgruntled by the political discord at the company caused by the activism.

The employees have a voice: as private citizens. The workplace is not a democratic community, and the employees are not its constituency. It a place where employer-employee come together to complete a mission that both sides consent to, otherwise they separate. Of course, mission is a negotiable term just like compensation and benefits, an employee is free to ask "in addition to pay you must also dedicate the company's resources and attention to my preferred causes", and the employer is free to decline. Coinbase is simply make it clear that changing their mission is not a price they are willing to pay, so please look elsewhere.

I think this brings clarity to the work relationship, as "the power to direct the political mission of the company" had been previously an unstated, unnegotiated axis of the terms of employment. People are now learning that this need to be crystal clear upfront.

You actually try to dodge things in these games? The control scheme is so horrible for that, I always presumed the correct way to play is “if you’re not nuking everything on the screen with ease, your build is wrong and you’re not strong enough. Come back later.”

Given that the Doom Reboot is all about juggling an insane number of tasks at once you’re better off playing it on PC anyway. In fact I suspect this series is limiting its potential audience because the core play style of fast weapon switching just isn’t very viable on console.