'Abolish Silicon Valley' Author Urges 'Expropriating' Platforms, Making them Open-Source Public Services (siliconvalley.com) 250
The Bay Area Newsgroup just interviewed the author of "Abolish Silicon Valley: How to liberate technology from capitalism".
Q: How do you fix this broken system?
A: Overall the goal that I'm thinking about is that you have the private sector so overfunded and glorified that it seems like the only way to do things, but things could be much better serviced by the public sector without the profit motive that the private sector demands. Reclaim the wealth from capital, push back capital and fund public innovation... Right now the way it works is all these tech companies are predicated on a very particular way of regulating work and will hire people short-time and pay them nothing and not provide them with safety nets.
There are also companies that shouldn't necessarily exist. A lot of companies are being funded to do something the public sector could've provided. Instead of good public transit, we have Uber. Instead of a good social mobility system, we get paid scooters. What people want is to streamline a centralized system that is run in a way that is accountable and actually serves the public...
My Utopian view is to put tech companies in full public view. Expropriate platforms and turn them into municipal services, public services and make them open-source.
A: Overall the goal that I'm thinking about is that you have the private sector so overfunded and glorified that it seems like the only way to do things, but things could be much better serviced by the public sector without the profit motive that the private sector demands. Reclaim the wealth from capital, push back capital and fund public innovation... Right now the way it works is all these tech companies are predicated on a very particular way of regulating work and will hire people short-time and pay them nothing and not provide them with safety nets.
There are also companies that shouldn't necessarily exist. A lot of companies are being funded to do something the public sector could've provided. Instead of good public transit, we have Uber. Instead of a good social mobility system, we get paid scooters. What people want is to streamline a centralized system that is run in a way that is accountable and actually serves the public...
My Utopian view is to put tech companies in full public view. Expropriate platforms and turn them into municipal services, public services and make them open-source.
Profit motive (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, government has the profit motive and the power motive. So good luck, let me know how that works out.
Re:Profit motive (Score:5, Interesting)
Only obvious thing I see that should be in public hands is last mile wired networking (not wireless). Imagine if your local last mile network went back to a public node where you could pick from hundreds of ISPs and content providers. It is silly to have last mile competition - it make no economic sense to wire people's homes with three, four or five different last mile wires. And worse, in many parts of the country there are last mile monopolies.
I'd like to see municipalities stop renewing last mile cable franchises and instead make offers to buy the last mile networks for a price set by an arbitrator. After they own the last mile set up the public nodes to allow access to hundreds of ISPs and content providers. If buying the last mile network is not feasible, create regulations which achieve the same effect.
With this model most of the reasons for net neutrality disappears. If your ISP starts misbehaving, it is trivial to switch to another one.
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Just my 2 cents
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I think in a lot of places it's just outright bribery, local politicians not necessarily being under much scrutiny.
Re:Profit motive (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, they're assuming (probably correctly , if history is any guide) that the politician pays no attention whatsoever to their constituents' wishes.
It is a mistake to assume that a politician is somehow superior to other men in always thinking first of the good that they can do for their fellow men. Evidence of history says they're thinking first of their own good, and after that they need a strong shot
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As opposed to Honest Donald who gets all his supporters the legitimate way.
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The last mile doesn't have to be owned by the public; it just has to be regulated as a utility. Your neighborhood's unique set of electrical connections is handled this way.
Re:Profit motive (Score:4, Interesting)
Tried that in the UK and it's shit. OpenReach, formerly BT, can't be bothered with upgrades. We are all stuck on extremely slow connections and fibre roll out is an absolute joke. Our internet is about 15 years behind the curve.
Years ago NEC offered to install fibre everywhere. The money went to BT instead who pissed it away. Literally, it mostly went into the champagne fund.
Sometimes regulation can work, but it needs to be much stronger than what we have.
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What about operating systems? Server operating systems are already owned by The People. And networking could be handled by mesh networking with web of trust decision making for routing, using strong crypto which is also in the hands of People.
Re: Profit motive (Score:3)
Here is the difference between private vs government ran services. When you don't like the service or it simply breaks and no longer provided, if it is a private company, you can just stop paying for it. Try that with taxes and they will come for you with guns, literally (eventually as they come to arrest you for tax evasion).
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That's not the difference of private vs government, that's the difference of competition vs no competition.
You can stop paying taxes if you stop doing the activity which is taxable, for instance your income tax will stop if your income also stops. You can stop paying for a public utility service like water if you stop using the water.
Some government services you get for free even if you can't afford to pay taxes. If you're homeless, unemployed and living illegally in an abandoned building you're not going t
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Over here the water bill is also the sewer bill and the property drainage bill. You can cancel water service, but I don't know how you would stop rain falling on your land.
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Because once you get past the last mile there is plenty of competition. Google search is not a monopoly, it is simply a high market share company. Nothing stops your fingers from typing Bing instead of Google except for your own personal choice. In the case of monopoly, I have Comcast or nothing, so I have Comcast. The difference is that monopolies actively manipulate the market to ensure that you have no choices about where you do business.
Other than last mile I don't think there are any Internet monopo
Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
So his grand solution to "save silicon valley from the EVIL capitalism" his unique vision is to... nationalize it like every other communist country has done to their industry and run it for the good of the people.
Sorry, that's BS and theft.
Why don't you go ask the people of Venezuela how their nationalized oil industry is working these days?
Re: Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re: Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
The best thing about the CIA is you can blame them for literally anything. Lost your car keys? CIA. Global warming? CIA. No chick wants to fuck you? Totally the CIA. Anyone asks for evidence? Clearly a CIA shill.
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Well, you can blame anyone for anything, but the record of the US sikrit services fucking up Latin and South America and supporting dictatorships of criminal cutthroats is pretty well-known, well-documented and hardly a subject of much doubt.
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You are not wrong about the CIA's terrible record in central america. That being said, Venezuela is currently a quasi-dictatorship of criminals that also have no fucking idea what the hell they are doing, and how they have caused a once-promising country to be circling the drain.
The CIA doesn't need to invest effort in Venezuela for it's government to collapse - it's going to do that by itself due to the painful ineptitude of their leadership.
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"who wouldn't bet that the CIA will still be clandestinely destroying Venezuela?"
I wouldn't. Venezuela does a more effective job of destroying themselves than any external influence could even dream of.
They live on what most say is the biggest oil reserve in the world. 25% of the people that work do the job of a criminal. They don't produce more than 30% of the food that the country requires to feed itself. 20 years ago their official bank currency transfer rate was equal to about 10% of the value of transf
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Why would the CIA need to invest the resources and effort when Venezuela themselves seem to be doing a perfectly fine job of destroying Venezuela?
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Yeah, great example. My oil stocks are worth so little right now they aren't even worth throwing away.
You may have found the solution to the toilet paper crisis.
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Yeah, great example. My oil stocks are worth so little right now they aren't even worth throwing away.
Why on earth did you own oil stocks this year? They were only going down before the Flu Manchu. Three weeks ago I was buying some oil-related stocks, as between the panic and oil being unsustainably cheap, there were some really good prices long-term. Still might be cheap, but they're up 50% off the panic bottom. At this rate Saudi's war against Iran will be won soon enough, and once Iran's capacity is offline long term, oil prices will come up. Or at least that's my bet.
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Well, demand went to zero and Putin+MBS went to war. Why would the rapid drop in the contract prices be considered panic as opposed to a rational repricing?
Markets never move down quickly to the rational price. They are by their nature a damped, driven system. They must, always overshoot on any quick correction, then "ring" before they settle on the new rational price. If you've ever tried to synthesize a square wave by driving a signal line up or down with a much higher frequency sine wave, you'll known exactly the curve I mean.
Commodities are not like equities where some SV bro pulls a number out of his ass and says that Tesla should be at $10k. It's based on real world deliverables and the risk of losing money on those commitments.
The price of TSLA is also based on real world deliverables and the risk of losing money. Oil is driven by speculators just as muc
Goose Egg? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Expropriation is necessary sometimes but a blanket Abolish Silicone Valley? A better target might be Pharmaceuticals.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Goose Egg? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously. For the most part, we outsource charity and safety nets to the government in the US. We shovel $trillions the government's way, and they do spend the vast majority of it on the old and the poor. Medicare/caid is almost double the defense budget now, and SS is 150% of the defense budget. Other programs like "welfare" (all the food/income security programs) and unemployment are collectively about as much as defense.
And there is some economy of scale in doing so, and while I'm sure there's some corruption in these programs, they get a ton of scrutiny, far more that what a million disparate corporate charities would hide.
Fundamentally, we don't want individual businesses trying to do charity directly for their employees, because they'll screw it up if the don't outright embezzle it. The shameful history of pension programs, especially in the 80s, shows that clearly enough.
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I didn't understand what you were trying to say. Businesses pay the government for some parts of government-managed charity; the taxpayer pays a lot more, but then it's the business paying the salary of the taxpayer who then gets taxed, so you can look at it either way.
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" like businesses don't pay UI, DI, half the Medicare/Medicaid taxes, corporate taxes, etc. "
Businesses wouldn't pay any of that stuff if they weren't forced to by law, and it diminishes the amount they're willing to pay you, so it's really more like you're paying it. The biggest businesses don't pay any corporate taxes, either, or they pay miniscule amounts. So yes, it's very like they don't pay any of those things.
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That's why you have temp workers, as they're considered part time, they don't qualify for the benefits. Things like health insurance and paid time off aren't necessarily written into law but are required if you want to hire certain classes of workers who can easily move to a competing business. The more likely a worker is to walk away from their employer, the more benefits their employer offers, although there's no guarantee those benefits are even worthwhile.
For instance, most employers offer some kind o
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but a blanket Abolish Silicone Valley?
Yeah, that's clear discrimination against fake boobs.
Yes, if you want to abolish SV tech, socialize it (Score:5, Insightful)
There are also companies that shouldn't necessarily exist. A lot of companies are being funded to do something the public sector could've provided. Instead of good public transit, we have Uber.
Uber and Lyft are point-to-point services that public transit does not provide. Transit carries large numbers of people to designated stations; rideshare can take them between a station and any address. If the two services can cooperate, they can coexist.
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Why wouldn't an uber like system can run better for drivers and riders on a more open and less profit based model.
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Not to mention Uber is profit driven but still not profitable. Why not let people who want to invest in Uber subsidize your rides so your taxes don't have to?
It's easy to say that the government or a non-profit should run a technology once we've found the one that works. But what about all the loser ideas along the way? If all social network ideas say had to run through government taxpayers wouldn't just have to pay the cost of creating Facebook they'd have to pay for MySpace, Friendster, Google+, Orkut, an
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Many public transit systems do offer point to point transport for some individuals, primarily the disabled. Autonomous vehicles have the potential to make it affordable to provide such service to all, whether we're talking about self driving cars or PRT on rails. We use buses literally only because they enable one driver to transport many passengers, and drivers are expensive. But so are buses, and so is the damage they do to roadways - orders of magnitude greater than cars or even vans.
Re:Yes, if you want to abolish SV tech, socialize (Score:5, Informative)
Except Uber & Lyft actually encourage LESS use of public services, cause more congestion and pollution, siphon money from local economies and do everything in their power to underpay their "contractors" while absolving themselves of all the liabilities a local taxi company would have to contend with.
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Re:Oh, fuck right off. (Score:5, Informative)
It's part of their mantra: "you didn't build that"
The anti-capitalists like the one in this post are indeed idiots, but the "you didn't build that" comment from Obama is consistently taken out of context. In that speech, Obama wasn't saying they didn't build the businesses, he was saying they didn't build the public infrastructure that the business depends upon. They didn't build the roads their employees use to get to work, or that the trucks use to deliver their products, etc.
Basically, it wasn't an attack on private business, it was a comment that they need to pay their fair share in taxes to support the services they benefit from. Which is a fair point. Here's the context:
I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.' No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
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Re: Oh, fuck right off. (Score:2)
Trump uses a teleprompter. What else would he blame when he says the wrong things?
Public roads are publicly funded, by taxes, you made Obama's point.
Oh and Trump plays more golf than Obama did, but it's ok, he needs the exercise more.
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Actually, they probably did. Government took money from businesses and individuals, then gave that money to other businesses to build the infrastructure. At least that's how it almost always works... So yes, private business pretty much DID build that.
Newsflash buddy, the business elites believe in free markets like people believe in fairies. They don't.
Free markets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Let's not also mention billions in energy subsidies:
https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/... [imf.org]
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It's part of their mantra: "you didn't build that"... Everything comes from The People, thus everything belongs to The People. It's what greedy, envious people do.
Right... because the business community really believes in the free market.
Free markets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Let's not also mention billions in energy subsidies:
https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/... [imf.org]
But keep believing business people are heroes and haven't been taking advantage of ignorant people like you to enjoy the wonders of the corporate nanny state.
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Liberate technology from capitalism? (Score:2)
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Speaking in such broad generalities means nothing.
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But it's broadly true. The ideas needed for the industrial revolution were around for centuries, from steam power to automation, but the incentives just weren't there. From the first steam engines onward, it's been the profit motive that turns ideas/science into actual products for sale.
Sure, that's a generalization, and there are exceptions, but in general it's true.
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Capitalism is just another technology, and not necessarily the best one we can come up with for managing money. It turned out not to be the best way to manage software, all of which will eventually be dominated by commie open source and free software.
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Believing that capitalism is great is a philosophy.
Believing that socialism or communism have been tested in good faith is a fallacy.
Re:Liberate technology from capitalism? (Score:4, Interesting)
Socialism definition (Score:3)
Socialism is capitalism wherein there is only one monopolistic player and no competition, but the same motives such as greed, miserliness, minimal service, etc. exist. Also they, the same entity, has total and overt control over all your military and police.
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Socialism [wikipedia.org] "is characterized by social ownership and operation of the means of production". It's not reserved "to the workers", it's society as a whole. Which is why Karl Marx said that socialism is just the in-between step from capitalism to communism. Once no individual "owns" the means of production, it defaults to the strongest organization controlling the means of production - and that usually ends up being the Government.
Socialism is just communism before it takes the last step towards complete Gov
Re: Socialism definition (Score:2)
Really, well then universal healthcare isn't socialism.
Furthermore, your definition makes no sense. You mean the only requirement is that the company be employee owned? You are free to do that in the current system.
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From Merriam Webster: Definition of socialism
1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental
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It's not an all-or-nothing world and sometimes "no competition" is good. Also, capitalism and competition are not the same. Unregulated capitalism leads to "one monopolistic player".
Brand New Idea! (Score:2)
Isn't that what all open source software has been doing, to varied degree of success, for many decades? I guess up to the point where they are municipal services.
The only "change" I feel is needed is more regulation about what users own versus what private companies own. Users should own any data they create, and any interop required that allows a user to use that data with different software should absolutely be possible without any fees or red tape. IP monopolies should be severely limited in that way - e
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Isn't that what all open source software has been doing, to varied degree of success, for many decades?
Well, yes, but one of the things OSS has failed to meaningfully do is make anything 'stick' that involves a network effect. No federated social network has taken off, I've never once gotten a Peertube or Mediagoblin link, Ownstagram is so impossible to get traction on that I doubt a Kardashian could make it happen, and despite the existence of RocketChat, MatterMost, Matrix, and Riot, the best competition Slack has is Microsoft Teams.
OSS is fantastic at web servers and IDEs and databases and web browsers an
Lol (Score:3)
Must be a slow news day. Slashdot decided to rile up the anti-socialists. Doesn't seem to be working very well though.
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Must be a slow news day.
They call it Easter.
Is this a joke? (Score:3)
Seriously...is this a joke? It is kind of late for April Foo Day.
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I missed Foo Day this year, but I'm go all-out on Bar Day.
LOL (Score:2, Redundant)
Well, that's radical (Score:4, Interesting)
Youtube, by comparison, is practically the entire video-enabled Web, but operated and monetized by one company.
Obviously there exist other sites, e.g. vimeo, and it is market forces that have selected one runaway winner - nevertheless it cannot be said that healthy competition exists.
Isn't there some reasonable solution?
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Yes, set up a website on a place that allows a few TB of bandwidth per month and serve videos from it. $5 a month can get you VM with 2TB bandwidth, so make ten of those serving 20TB for $50 a month.
easy peasy.
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Leave them be. Their own sloth will be their downfall.
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It simply wont happen until youtube pisses off enough people. At that point platforms like twitch will easily take over.
Youtube is not in a strong position. It sits precariously at the top.
Once upon a time, K-Mart was claimed to be a monopoly, until Walmart came along and now K-Mart is essentially dead. Then it was claimed that Walmart is a monopoly. Behold that Amazon is destroying Walmart. Soon
Re:Well, that's radical (Score:5, Informative)
Odd, K-Mart/Sears was cannibalized by it's Libertarian owner who pitted it's internal structure against each other. I don't recall the government having anything to do with it.
So you say only the government can make a monopoly... and you are incorrect. Or is the government propping up Apple's App store? Or were they mandating everyone use Windows? The government "allows" monopolies, unless they are abusive to their customers or partners. Which leads us to..
AT&T.. they had a monopoly because it was an agreement to get phone coverage across the entire nation and not just the highly profitable urban centers AT&T wanted to service. Meanwhile AT&T enjoyed a comfortable working arrangement with the government where rural phone coverage was subsidized. And then there was Bell Laboratories, where many innovations were discovered, with government funding. Did you know they created a phone answering machine in the 30's? Of course not, because AT&T killed it dead to prevent "competition" with their phone service, didn't want people just mailing out tapes instead.
AT&T was broken up because it's monopoly became abusive. Neither the monopoly existing or being dissolved were failures of government.
Power companies can damn well stop solar, or slow it down as they've already done for the past couple of decades.
You seem to live in some Libertarian fantasy land where if government were removed corporations would play fairly and not sabotage each other, commit espionage, team up to destroy smaller competitors or collude to fix prices. That's just a basic denial of human behavior there, especially as most corporations are run by amoral sociopaths and completely ignores historical precedents every time the shackles are taken off capitalism.
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Expropriate, I don't think so. However, I am bothered by the monopolization of the web. The original text-based web was very distributed, all based on open protocols.
Youtube, by comparison, is practically the entire video-enabled Web, but operated and monetized by one company.
The "web" is still very much distributed, and hasn't become any less so. Its namesake refers to hypertext and linking. Youtube may carry a large internet bandwidth share (actually Netflix is at the top though) but that doesn't mean that other sites don't get a decent amount of visitor traffic. Reading a slashdot article for two minutes uses considerably less bandwidth than watching a two minute youtube video. That doesn't mean the youtube video was more popular.
However, what has become more centralized is t
What is the intended outcome? (Score:2)
This rubbish seems to yearn to combine the agility and innovation of government with the deathspiral promise of the open source companies of the early 2000s. All it needs is a new edition of the Little Red Book and a Five Year Plan to produce (finally) the year of the (government) Linux desktop. I doubt if a Five Year Plan will be enough since "no amount of code can substitute for political engagement." I guess the coders/programmers will have other things to do than write code, including "eradication of
No profit = No motivation = DMV (Score:5, Interesting)
What a great idea! Put the government in charge and give everyone involved the same stipend regardless of talent, experience, or effort. Pretty soon the tech world will be filled with products and customer service that emulate your local DMV. Good luck!
You would first have to abolish sociopathy (Score:2)
aka psychopathy.
And the rampant drug use that "enhances" that.
Aka the entire "culture".
And that is only possible, by replacing all those people.
Which I obviousy approve of. But isn't realistic without a good long-term plan. Especially something powerful that sees it through, and is unaffected by the large-scale propaganda that will obviously pop up when the snakes are winding and twisting and fighting in fear of death.
Hear, hear! (Score:2)
The first place we should put this into effect is for authors who formulate public policy and then expect to get rich off of the publishing proceeds. They should all be moved into the public service sector, writing proposals and helping to implement the required legislation. As GS-5 federal employees.
Lol (Score:2)
Why would you want to remove capitalism? (Score:2)
If you "liberate" technology from capitalism, you remove the best method for people using technology to signal to the people making the technology what kinds of improvements and new produc
Re:Why would you want to remove capitalism? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, desktop Linux languishes at 1% because of anticompetitive behavior on the part of Microsoft (and others, but mostly Microsoft) as determined by the USDoJ, which found that Microsoft had a monopoly position (legal) which it abused in basically every possible way (illegal.) Then Bush's AG John Ashcroft declared that it would not be in America's best interest to prosecute Microsoft or Bill Gates for those crimes. Shortly thereafter Gates put his ill-gotten gains into a trust over which he exercises ultimate control, where they cannot be taxed, and which he wields in ways which are personally profitable to him, and which benefit big oil and big pharma. BushCo is invested in the former, and Gates in the latter.
It has been estimated that under Gates, Microsoft set computing back a decade with its anticompetitive behavior, notably the many attempts to crush Linux - now the dominant server operating system across the world.
I'm on my phone so citations are a hassle, but if any interested parties really can't find them with Google based on keywords from my comment, I'll give it a shot. (But also, FFS, learn to internet.)
Sounds great move to Venezuela (Score:2)
The author is Chinese (Score:2)
Funny how many come to the US and yet want the same centralized system they just escaped from.
Any prior history to show that this would work? (Score:2)
complete bullshit (Score:2)
Buy Uber stock (Score:2)
The whole business model of Uber is people with cars they cant afford the payments on now that they have lost their job in a recession.
Uber got their start in 2008 and would have probably gone bankrupt in 2021 but COVID has now provided a new batch of sheep to shave (aka Uber drivers)
Like Moths to a Flame (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:2)
There are tons of lands where government eviscerates private enterpt....oh we don't wanna live in those.
I don't think you can separate them. (Score:2)
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They don't go away in socialism or communism, either, which is why socialism always ends in a spiral of totalitarianism.
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But I am saying that Capitalism in this country (and perhaps much of the world) is way, way, WAY out of control, corporations have too much power and too much say, and too much sway in our society(s) and that's hurting everyone that isn't them.
The problem with public property (Score:2)
Worker-owned businesses (Score:2)
You know what i think would achieve the aims just as well if not better? Transform corporations such as Google, Facebook, & Microsoft into worker-owned businesses. That means that every worker is a member & a shareholder. As such, they elect & employ the board of directors & have a vote on certain aspects of how their companies are run. It may be easy for a closeted board of directors to agree to egregious business practices & unethical behaviour but it's much harder to do when they're h
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...if the 'public' sector could provide a comparable service/product for a similar cost they would already be doing it. The example of public transportation is perfect. The reason public transportation is inexpensive isn't because it is well run and efficient. It's because it is subsidized with tax dollars. The private sector could provide 'public' transportation services and I imagine it would cost significantly less overall per person per mile than the 'public' sector model with all it's bureaucracy. However it may cost the rider more than what they pay now because the burden to keep the system up and running is on the business and not subsidized by the tax payer.
I think that if you actually check lots of public services do in fact take bids from private companies to provide the service. None of the bus drivers around here are public employees, it's all private companies that bid for the right to operate the line. Of course it's not appropriate for everything, but it's not like public services must be done by public employees. The point is that you're covering the difference between what it actually costs and the price you want it to operate at.
That's actually the
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...if the 'public' sector could provide a comparable service/product for a similar cost they would already be doing it.
No, no they would not, because capitalists have paid for a number of laws that make it illegal, ie municipal broadband. If there's not already a law in place, they'll just fight it in court until they can slap a bandaid over the issue and then scream "See? We serve that area, there's no need for this government 'waste'".
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Example:Example:
If the USPS was so freaking awesome then
- there would be no UPS, FedEx, DHL, and now Amazon Shipping
- they would work 7 days a week without needing the 'Amazon Bailout'
- they would have continued to be government run instead of changing to be a 'quasi-government' organization
UPS, FedEx & Amazon all rely on the Post Office to carry their packages to their less profitable areas.
They did work 6 days a week, until people stopped writing letters so much. UPS & FedEx don't deliver 7 days a week either.
The Post Office is older than the United States and is written into the Constitution. It has always been a government agency since the Constitution was written and the Post Master General used to be in the line of succession for the Presidency.
The biggest reason for the Post O
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Post offices -yes.
Postal roads - no longer relevant - yes.
Delivery of mail - no.
Ah, yes, because a post office is funded to just sit there. The post office sorts & delivers mail, ergo mail delivery. Or do you want to start arguing that because the constitution only explicitly states "freedom of speech", it only applies to vocal sounds and not written texts, music or the arts?
As for your analysis of pensions, perhaps now that in your 20s you think that CONTRACT WITH EMPLOYEES can be rewritten randomly once the employees get older so the employees get screwed out of a pension. Ok, fair enough. Do you also suggest the "do your 20 and retire" that applies to cops should be abolished? Because that's the same thing?
Funny, a lot of Republican Governors felt they could drop every public pension EXCEPT police...
How about military retirement? Yes? No? Companies and government offer pensions as a method to defer compensation. In other words "We'll pay you less per year, but after 20 years of faithfully service us [unless Trump fires you the day before you retire] you're set for life at some identified fraction of income." There is no scam here.
Nobody PREFUNDS pensions decades in advance, and certainly not for employees they haven't even hired yet. They p