I don't think it should be based on market cap, but rather based on how much the size of the company is limiting freedom. It may help if I include a less constrained form of my sig:
The locus of choice is ~5 because that's about how many things you can hold in short-term memory while you are trying to be free. The research often reports 3 to 7 items.
The pro-greedom approach says two choices is already getting unreasonable, on the theory that no profit-maximizing company should even compete in a market unless the company can be #1 or #2. Under that sick theory, the only legitimate reason for being for #2 is because the company "thinks" it can eventually become #1. At the other extreme, you have fake options, such as the mobile phone market, where you often get 20 choices from the same carrier and you can't figure it out so you're easily manipulated into taking the phone the carrier wanted to sell you in the first place--based on the same insane goal of maximizing the corporation's profits without limit.
Actually I think it would require fairly detailed accounting to figure out how to do it properly. You'd need to break the profits down by where they come from. If a particular part of the profit comes from dominating a particular market, then that part would get taxed at a high rate, whereas the parts of the profits that were derived from sectors with normal competition would be taxed at lower rates. It should be a good thing that computers are good at that sort of math, eh?
If you look at it from a shareholders' perspective, the shareholders would actually benefit from splitting their shares between the new companies that are each taxed at the lower rate. To simplify it, imagine that the company only produces one product and that it totally dominates its market and gets taxed at the highest rate. After cutting the company into three pieces and giving all the shareholders equal shares in the new competing ( = freedom-increasing) companies, they would now own companies that are producing the same products and the same profits, but with competition between them, and all of the profits would be taxed at the lower rate. (Though you might well have to do it again later on if one of the new companies turns out to be a much better competitor than the others.)
My chief problem with your market-cap based approach is that it's based on a lie. The stock price has become a fantasy. There is no perfect information, so the stock prices are never accurate. What we actually have now is a computerized casino where one program buys the shares whenever it "thinks" some other program will buy them at a higher price later on. Why? The programs are NOT actually thinking and have NO idea what is going on in the actual world.
Just reviewing the comments moderated insightful. Yours stood out as the one that started in the right direction and then turned farthest in the wrong direction. I'm trying to figure out if what that indicates about the broken state of Slashdot's moderation system.
Then again, this topic is a fundamentally complicated one. Perhaps it was simply impossible to hope for a meaningful discussion within the constraints imposed by the tool?
Short response to your actual comment: I think you started in the right direction but missed a key constraint on the problem and wound up in a no-solution part of the solution space. Trapped in a local minimum, as the joke goes? If you want to pursue the basis of my disagreement, my alternative solution is mentioned in a comment that only attracted a lot of attention from the trolls, a wild mix of moderation, and no thoughtful discussion at all. You can search for "pro-freedom" as the key term.
Just had to come back to this thread to see what the trolls were so riled up about. Perhaps I should have spent more time "studying" their bits of drivel in search of some actual meaning buried in the BS. Deeply buried.
Easier to just step back and look at one of the (many) higher level problems of Slashdot.
If you're visiting Slashdot in search of a thoughtful and rational discussion of ANY of the deep issues at hand, then it certainly seems that you've come to the wrong place.
Perhaps you'll have better luck if you try again with one of those time machines Stephen Hawking wrote about? I haven't read that piece yet, but based on his other writings that I have read, I supposed its another multiverse thing where you avoid the infinite loop with the theory that some of the spawned new universes never develop the time machines. (But is it necessary to assume that the "some" has an upper bound before things go critical? No such thing as too many universes?)
So far everything I have seen in this discussion (both above and below this 'insertion point' for this comment') has been mindless regurgitation of stupid lies and complaints about the lies. Just the place for an appeal to first principles in search of a well reasoned debate. ROFLMAO.
What we have now are tax systems that reward corporate cancers for becoming as huge and cancerous as possible. Insofar as there is any pretense of justification, it always comes down to "bigger is better", so the profits MUST increase.
I regard that as an insane anti-solution in search of a real problem. There will NEVER be any profit that "solves" the fake problem because there is always a larger number. Cancers always kill their hosts. In this case, corporate cancers will eventually kill the societies that are hosting them. Or maybe they already have, and we're just walking dead and about to discover that our extinction is the natural resolution of the Fermi Paradox.
Strangely enough, I think there is a solution, and the Germans seem to be on the right track. However I think it is better if your think in terms of pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation. As market share increases, so should the tax rate on your profits. This is NOT a penalty for success, but rather an incentive to split the company into competing companies that will take the good ideas into different directions, while simultaneously giving us MORE choices and MORE freedom. The basic objective (per my sig) should be to make sure there are around 3 to 7 choices in play for each shopping decision, not the 1 or 2 choices that the profit maximizers demand.
What we have now is a pro-greedom taxation system. America just has the greediest and most dysfunctional version of it.
Basically that's the answer I was searching for in this tedious discussion. I can't tell if there is no sense to be found here, the moderation system is just that badly broken, or I'm just too dense to figure out the right key words to search for.
The problem in high productivity societies is that most people have too much excess time available unless they are somehow paid for their recreational time. The problem is spreading fairly rapidly.
Ekronomics 101. Think about the time, not the money. Then you realize you can't tell them to drop dead. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Slashdot Mirror
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I don't think it should be based on market cap, but rather based on how much the size of the company is limiting freedom. It may help if I include a less constrained form of my sig:
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
The locus of choice is ~5 because that's about how many things you can hold in short-term memory while you are trying to be free. The research often reports 3 to 7 items.
The pro-greedom approach says two choices is already getting unreasonable, on the theory that no profit-maximizing company should even compete in a market unless the company can be #1 or #2. Under that sick theory, the only legitimate reason for being for #2 is because the company "thinks" it can eventually become #1. At the other extreme, you have fake options, such as the mobile phone market, where you often get 20 choices from the same carrier and you can't figure it out so you're easily manipulated into taking the phone the carrier wanted to sell you in the first place--based on the same insane goal of maximizing the corporation's profits without limit.
Actually I think it would require fairly detailed accounting to figure out how to do it properly. You'd need to break the profits down by where they come from. If a particular part of the profit comes from dominating a particular market, then that part would get taxed at a high rate, whereas the parts of the profits that were derived from sectors with normal competition would be taxed at lower rates. It should be a good thing that computers are good at that sort of math, eh?
If you look at it from a shareholders' perspective, the shareholders would actually benefit from splitting their shares between the new companies that are each taxed at the lower rate. To simplify it, imagine that the company only produces one product and that it totally dominates its market and gets taxed at the highest rate. After cutting the company into three pieces and giving all the shareholders equal shares in the new competing ( = freedom-increasing) companies, they would now own companies that are producing the same products and the same profits, but with competition between them, and all of the profits would be taxed at the lower rate. (Though you might well have to do it again later on if one of the new companies turns out to be a much better competitor than the others.)
My chief problem with your market-cap based approach is that it's based on a lie. The stock price has become a fantasy. There is no perfect information, so the stock prices are never accurate. What we actually have now is a computerized casino where one program buys the shares whenever it "thinks" some other program will buy them at a higher price later on. Why? The programs are NOT actually thinking and have NO idea what is going on in the actual world.
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Just reviewing the comments moderated insightful. Yours stood out as the one that started in the right direction and then turned farthest in the wrong direction. I'm trying to figure out if what that indicates about the broken state of Slashdot's moderation system.
Then again, this topic is a fundamentally complicated one. Perhaps it was simply impossible to hope for a meaningful discussion within the constraints imposed by the tool?
Short response to your actual comment: I think you started in the right direction but missed a key constraint on the problem and wound up in a no-solution part of the solution space. Trapped in a local minimum, as the joke goes? If you want to pursue the basis of my disagreement, my alternative solution is mentioned in a comment that only attracted a lot of attention from the trolls, a wild mix of moderation, and no thoughtful discussion at all. You can search for "pro-freedom" as the key term.
Just had to come back to this thread to see what the trolls were so riled up about. Perhaps I should have spent more time "studying" their bits of drivel in search of some actual meaning buried in the BS. Deeply buried.
Easier to just step back and look at one of the (many) higher level problems of Slashdot.
If you're visiting Slashdot in search of a thoughtful and rational discussion of ANY of the deep issues at hand, then it certainly seems that you've come to the wrong place.
Perhaps you'll have better luck if you try again with one of those time machines Stephen Hawking wrote about? I haven't read that piece yet, but based on his other writings that I have read, I supposed its another multiverse thing where you avoid the infinite loop with the theory that some of the spawned new universes never develop the time machines. (But is it necessary to assume that the "some" has an upper bound before things go critical? No such thing as too many universes?)
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Read what I wrote. If you are unable to understand it, then ask a (polite) question and I will explain.
If you don't want to understand it and are also incapable of understanding it, then that's sufficient reasons not to engage in discussion.
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Is that the greatest depth of your intellect? No PR for you.
Once again, I lament the lack of a kill list or block feature on Slashdot.
"Discussion" terminated.
So far everything I have seen in this discussion (both above and below this 'insertion point' for this comment') has been mindless regurgitation of stupid lies and complaints about the lies. Just the place for an appeal to first principles in search of a well reasoned debate. ROFLMAO.
What we have now are tax systems that reward corporate cancers for becoming as huge and cancerous as possible. Insofar as there is any pretense of justification, it always comes down to "bigger is better", so the profits MUST increase.
I regard that as an insane anti-solution in search of a real problem. There will NEVER be any profit that "solves" the fake problem because there is always a larger number. Cancers always kill their hosts. In this case, corporate cancers will eventually kill the societies that are hosting them. Or maybe they already have, and we're just walking dead and about to discover that our extinction is the natural resolution of the Fermi Paradox.
Strangely enough, I think there is a solution, and the Germans seem to be on the right track. However I think it is better if your think in terms of pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation. As market share increases, so should the tax rate on your profits. This is NOT a penalty for success, but rather an incentive to split the company into competing companies that will take the good ideas into different directions, while simultaneously giving us MORE choices and MORE freedom. The basic objective (per my sig) should be to make sure there are around 3 to 7 choices in play for each shopping decision, not the 1 or 2 choices that the profit maximizers demand.
What we have now is a pro-greedom taxation system. America just has the greediest and most dysfunctional version of it.
Time's up, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
In moderated terms: You must be overpaid, not overrated.
Basically that's the answer I was searching for in this tedious discussion. I can't tell if there is no sense to be found here, the moderation system is just that badly broken, or I'm just too dense to figure out the right key words to search for.
The problem in high productivity societies is that most people have too much excess time available unless they are somehow paid for their recreational time. The problem is spreading fairly rapidly.
Ekronomics 101. Think about the time, not the money. Then you realize you can't tell them to drop dead. ADSAuPR, atAJG.