Is it now illegal for a company to simply become too big?
Yes, as long as you understand that by "now" you mean since 1890, and specifically this kind of merger since 1914. Both those laws were created because of large firms engaged in various forms of price gouging and other efforts to artificially inflate prices on commonly used goods such as gasoline and steel.
I don't generally dislike the use of epithets like "Rethuglican" and "Democrap" because it just makes you sound childish, no matter how important your point.
It also obscures the fundamental issue: A significant majority of Congresscritters and Presidents, and at least a few Supreme Court justices, regardless of party, are making it very clear that they can be bribed to wreck the US government. How they wreck it varies, who bribes them varies, but that's the problem in a nutshell.
I don't think iPad production is ruining Chinese workers lives. If it were (and I see no indication that it is) I would agree... we can get by without a widget that causes real suffering somewhere else.
Perhaps you might have seen this 2 days ago on Slashdot: "The report claims that over a 10-year period, 'many people have fallen sick, with a sharp increase in the village's cancer rates.'"
Net result: $14,000 iPads. I'm not sure I like the ramifications of that either.
Two counterarguments: 1. For the vast majority of consumer products, labor is not the largest expense. In addition, not all increased costs of production get reflected in the consumer price - some comes out of profits per unit, because a rational producer doesn't want to reduce the number of units sold too much. So you're probably looking a price of closer to a $1000 or $750 iPad rather than a $500 iPad even if you massively increase the cost of each worker.
2. If it really costs $13,800 to produce an iPad in a way that doesn't ruin the lives of workers, then that's the true cost of an iPad, and any price lower than that is in effect me (as the consumer) and Apple (via their profit margins) stealing value I didn't create from those workers in China. It means there might be fewer iPads in the world, but the world won't end if I don't have an iPad.
Our police are actually much more likely to shoot, beat, or taze black and Hispanic men than "fat black bitches". Not saying they won't shoot a black woman either, but generally speaking they will tend to view black men in particular as enemies, regardless of who they are and what they are doing.
And obviously a black man has a much worse chance of getting shot than a pretty white girl doing the exact same thing.
People bitching about there being no jobs often haven't explored relocation and there are jobs, just not in your locale perhaps.
Either that, or they're experiencing the current reality that for every open position there are 6 people currently not working. If you make the generous assumption that 3 of those 6 are horrible employees that nobody would want to hire, then out of the remaining 3 at least 2 are screwed. You'll run into situations where you have 3 roughly equally qualified applicants applying for the same job, and then hiring managers are making their call on variables other than qualifications and demonstrated capability. That means that things like race, age, gender, marital status, disabilities, perceived sexual orientation, and religion end up having noticeable effects (regardless of laws against these kinds of discrimination).
The difficulty of relocation also depends a lot on your life situation. If you're a single guy renting an apartment in Chicago and there's a great job in Peoria, moving is a relatively cheap and easy thing to do. If you're married with children living in a house with 5 years left on your mortgage, it's much more expensive, difficult, and riskier.
Why do the American patriots have to abandon our country to those who have corrupted it and blasphemed against liberty and justice? Why not fight back, and put our nation back on the path towards a better America?
The major reasons this doesn't happen are closely related to characteristics of true patriots that differ heavily from corporatists, classists, and authoritarians. Here are some of the bigger ones: 1. The patriots aren't willing to completely wreck the country if they don't get what they want. 2. The patriots aren't willing to cheat, and in most cases aren't willing to commit violent or property crime, in order to gain power. 3. Patriots who are not authoritarian are much less organized than authoritarians, who by their very nature are able to move in lock-step. 4. Patriots are aware that if the authoritarians turned the US military, or military contractors like Xe, on the US citizenry, the authoritarians would likely win, even if they lost would wreck the place in the process (see point 1).
Corporations are required by law to be completely amoral money-making machines. They are supposed to pursue all legal avenues for profit, and can be sued by their shareholders if they do not. Therefor, it is no surprise that the vast majority of major corporations, even ones with slogans like "Don't be evil", will work with oppressive regimes in order to gain access to new sources of revenue.
It's worth noting the German government sometimes allows Nazi imagery to be used, so long as it's clearly not pro-Nazi. For instance, a couple of years ago, there was a production of The Producers in a theater in Berlin that Adolf Hitler used to frequent.
It's quite possible to have both the experiences you describe, and unemployment having a 95% effectiveness rate. Imagine, if you will, an area with 10000 unemployed people. 5% of those 10000, or 500, are the kinds of cheats you describe, and 50 of those people are ones you actually want to hire if you can.
You will see the 500 cheats, because they are going to go around to every single potential employer and never getting hired. You might, if you're lucky, see some of the 50 people you want to hire (they might get hired by your competitors). You will never see the remaining 9450, because they're legitimately looking for work and realize that they aren't a good match for your firm.
Or another way of putting it, as Joel Spolsky points out in his advice on finding good employees, the people you really want are almost never on the market (because they're either happily employed or snatched up really quickly), while the people you don't want are always on the market and applying for everything under the sun.
If a government policy promises consequence A, and gets 95% of A and 5% of unintended consequences, is it something that should just be thrown away?
I'm all in favor of judging a government policy based on the usefulness of its goals and its effectiveness in achieving its goals. I'm not in favor of rejecting all government actions of any kind because it's not going to be 100% of what was planned on.
To make this a bit more concrete: Assume 5% of recipients of unemployment are rejecting job offers because they can live off a government check. Assume the remaining 95% would be homeless and quite possibly forced into a life of crime if they didn't have unemployment checks coming in. Since there are a few people that are taking advantage of unemployment who don't really need it, should we scrap the whole thing? (Note that this is an separate argument from whether government should be in the business of supporting the unemployed at all, since you're argument is based on ineffectiveness of a policy rather than whether the goal is a desired one.)
Yes, wer'e all powerless to be informed consumers. All we can do is give companies money for shiny things and leave the consequences up to others.
Actually, we are fairly powerless.
For instance: Let's say there are 10 suppliers of consumer desktops capable of running my software of choice at an acceptable level of performance. Now, all those suppliers need a supplier of memory chips, so they all go out to the free market looking for memory chip manufacturers, and find that they're all, quite independently, talking to the 2-3 vendors of memory chips. Each memory chip manufacturer, in turn, is looking to keep the costs down, builds their factory in China because of the business-friendly laws and regulations and giant supply of workers. The factory management, trying to keep costs down to look good to their bosses, skirts and breaks even the loose environmental and labor laws that China imposes. Now, when I as a consumer go to buy a desktop to run my software of choice, I can choose from any of those 10 vendors, but all of them depend on the same 2-3 factories in China, so it doesn't matter at all (from an environmental and labor rights perspective) which one I choose.
Now, you might argue "well, somebody else could set up another environmentally-friendly factory elsewhere." And in theory they could. But in practice, they'd be driven out of business by somebody who uses the same low-cost factories as everyone else and performs a rubber-stamp audit that doesn't look too carefully so they can claim that they're environmentally friendly.
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, A sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see Are moving at a million miles a day In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'. Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars. It's a hundred thousand light years side to side. It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick, But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide. We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point. We go 'round every two hundred million years, And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whizz As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth, And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
The money trail leads to (among other places) former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, who made the decision to buy the body scanners while he had a financial interest in the company selling them. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
In all seriousness, I've noticed a shift towards even more commercial-oriented headlines (company X is selling nifty new product Y!) and inflammatory summaries and article titles since CmdrTaco left. I sincerely hope this is the result of a small sample size and not a sign of things to come.
Of course, there are still some third-world shitholes where people think that a witch-doctor rubbing feces on an open wound will ward off the evil spirits.
I'm not sure where you got that image of how those sorts of shaman/healer types do their jobs. They'll usually go with attempts at herbal treatment that have a chance of working that is slightly better than a placebo, based on learning from previous generations who figured out that rubbing feces on wounds was a good way to cause the patient to get even sicker and die. They tend to pick their herbs for apparent effectiveness, and often have chosen things with the right chemical compound or physiological effects, just not at as high a concentration or as good a delivery system as Western medicines.
Those healers from isolated tribes today, and our cavemen before us, were the brainy folks in their societies, and there's no reason to think they were any stupider than we are. They are just working with very limited tools, and are quite ignorant.
There's another option: 3. He's an intelligence agent for either a government or business assigned to spy on Wikileaks, and then given the order to discredit them and take them out of commission without creating any martyrs. As a side effect, he might be setting up Openleaks to be a honeypot making it nice and easy to catch those trying to leak to the public.
To add more evidence to this, consider how well Carly Fiorina has been treated in the press. When she was running for public office, all the press was on how she was a successful businesswoman who knew how to make an organization successful, despite all the evidence that the opposite was true.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it now illegal for a company to simply become too big?
Yes, as long as you understand that by "now" you mean since 1890, and specifically this kind of merger since 1914. Both those laws were created because of large firms engaged in various forms of price gouging and other efforts to artificially inflate prices on commonly used goods such as gasoline and steel.
I don't generally dislike the use of epithets like "Rethuglican" and "Democrap" because it just makes you sound childish, no matter how important your point.
It also obscures the fundamental issue: A significant majority of Congresscritters and Presidents, and at least a few Supreme Court justices, regardless of party, are making it very clear that they can be bribed to wreck the US government. How they wreck it varies, who bribes them varies, but that's the problem in a nutshell.
Hair is all about vanity and insecurity.
It also helps keep you warm in the winter, and reduces how easily your scalp gets sunburnt in the summer. So it's not entirely a matter of vanity.
Yeah, when I first read the headline, I was thinking an OS named "Cosmo" was geared towards 50 new ways to please your man.
I don't think iPad production is ruining Chinese workers lives. If it were (and I see no indication that it is) I would agree... we can get by without a widget that causes real suffering somewhere else.
Perhaps you might have seen this 2 days ago on Slashdot: "The report claims that over a 10-year period, 'many people have fallen sick, with a sharp increase in the village's cancer rates.'"
Net result: $14,000 iPads. I'm not sure I like the ramifications of that either.
Two counterarguments:
1. For the vast majority of consumer products, labor is not the largest expense. In addition, not all increased costs of production get reflected in the consumer price - some comes out of profits per unit, because a rational producer doesn't want to reduce the number of units sold too much. So you're probably looking a price of closer to a $1000 or $750 iPad rather than a $500 iPad even if you massively increase the cost of each worker.
2. If it really costs $13,800 to produce an iPad in a way that doesn't ruin the lives of workers, then that's the true cost of an iPad, and any price lower than that is in effect me (as the consumer) and Apple (via their profit margins) stealing value I didn't create from those workers in China. It means there might be fewer iPads in the world, but the world won't end if I don't have an iPad.
Our police are actually much more likely to shoot, beat, or taze black and Hispanic men than "fat black bitches". Not saying they won't shoot a black woman either, but generally speaking they will tend to view black men in particular as enemies, regardless of who they are and what they are doing.
And obviously a black man has a much worse chance of getting shot than a pretty white girl doing the exact same thing.
People bitching about there being no jobs often haven't explored relocation and there are jobs, just not in your locale perhaps.
Either that, or they're experiencing the current reality that for every open position there are 6 people currently not working. If you make the generous assumption that 3 of those 6 are horrible employees that nobody would want to hire, then out of the remaining 3 at least 2 are screwed. You'll run into situations where you have 3 roughly equally qualified applicants applying for the same job, and then hiring managers are making their call on variables other than qualifications and demonstrated capability. That means that things like race, age, gender, marital status, disabilities, perceived sexual orientation, and religion end up having noticeable effects (regardless of laws against these kinds of discrimination).
The difficulty of relocation also depends a lot on your life situation. If you're a single guy renting an apartment in Chicago and there's a great job in Peoria, moving is a relatively cheap and easy thing to do. If you're married with children living in a house with 5 years left on your mortgage, it's much more expensive, difficult, and riskier.
You're just some kind of freak, aren't you? I'm not a fan of that sort of behavior.
Why do the American patriots have to abandon our country to those who have corrupted it and blasphemed against liberty and justice? Why not fight back, and put our nation back on the path towards a better America?
The major reasons this doesn't happen are closely related to characteristics of true patriots that differ heavily from corporatists, classists, and authoritarians. Here are some of the bigger ones:
1. The patriots aren't willing to completely wreck the country if they don't get what they want.
2. The patriots aren't willing to cheat, and in most cases aren't willing to commit violent or property crime, in order to gain power.
3. Patriots who are not authoritarian are much less organized than authoritarians, who by their very nature are able to move in lock-step.
4. Patriots are aware that if the authoritarians turned the US military, or military contractors like Xe, on the US citizenry, the authoritarians would likely win, even if they lost would wreck the place in the process (see point 1).
Corporations are required by law to be completely amoral money-making machines. They are supposed to pursue all legal avenues for profit, and can be sued by their shareholders if they do not. Therefor, it is no surprise that the vast majority of major corporations, even ones with slogans like "Don't be evil", will work with oppressive regimes in order to gain access to new sources of revenue.
It's worth noting the German government sometimes allows Nazi imagery to be used, so long as it's clearly not pro-Nazi. For instance, a couple of years ago, there was a production of The Producers in a theater in Berlin that Adolf Hitler used to frequent.
It's quite possible to have both the experiences you describe, and unemployment having a 95% effectiveness rate. Imagine, if you will, an area with 10000 unemployed people. 5% of those 10000, or 500, are the kinds of cheats you describe, and 50 of those people are ones you actually want to hire if you can.
You will see the 500 cheats, because they are going to go around to every single potential employer and never getting hired. You might, if you're lucky, see some of the 50 people you want to hire (they might get hired by your competitors). You will never see the remaining 9450, because they're legitimately looking for work and realize that they aren't a good match for your firm.
Or another way of putting it, as Joel Spolsky points out in his advice on finding good employees, the people you really want are almost never on the market (because they're either happily employed or snatched up really quickly), while the people you don't want are always on the market and applying for everything under the sun.
what would keep some 'rouge' entity (nation or otherwise) from ... occupying the thing
Are you saying that Sarah Palin is going to try to take over the ISS? She could certainly cause huge political embarrassment.
If a government policy promises consequence A, and gets 95% of A and 5% of unintended consequences, is it something that should just be thrown away?
I'm all in favor of judging a government policy based on the usefulness of its goals and its effectiveness in achieving its goals. I'm not in favor of rejecting all government actions of any kind because it's not going to be 100% of what was planned on.
To make this a bit more concrete: Assume 5% of recipients of unemployment are rejecting job offers because they can live off a government check. Assume the remaining 95% would be homeless and quite possibly forced into a life of crime if they didn't have unemployment checks coming in. Since there are a few people that are taking advantage of unemployment who don't really need it, should we scrap the whole thing? (Note that this is an separate argument from whether government should be in the business of supporting the unemployed at all, since you're argument is based on ineffectiveness of a policy rather than whether the goal is a desired one.)
Yes, wer'e all powerless to be informed consumers. All we can do is give companies money for shiny things and leave the consequences up to others.
Actually, we are fairly powerless.
For instance: Let's say there are 10 suppliers of consumer desktops capable of running my software of choice at an acceptable level of performance. Now, all those suppliers need a supplier of memory chips, so they all go out to the free market looking for memory chip manufacturers, and find that they're all, quite independently, talking to the 2-3 vendors of memory chips. Each memory chip manufacturer, in turn, is looking to keep the costs down, builds their factory in China because of the business-friendly laws and regulations and giant supply of workers. The factory management, trying to keep costs down to look good to their bosses, skirts and breaks even the loose environmental and labor laws that China imposes. Now, when I as a consumer go to buy a desktop to run my software of choice, I can choose from any of those 10 vendors, but all of them depend on the same 2-3 factories in China, so it doesn't matter at all (from an environmental and labor rights perspective) which one I choose.
Now, you might argue "well, somebody else could set up another environmentally-friendly factory elsewhere." And in theory they could. But in practice, they'd be driven out of business by somebody who uses the same low-cost factories as everyone else and performs a rubber-stamp audit that doesn't look too carefully so they can claim that they're environmentally friendly.
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
One of the better bits Eric Idle came up with.
You left out the part where we burn their headquarters to the ground and sow the Earth with salt to ensure that nothing ever grows there again.
The money trail leads to (among other places) former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, who made the decision to buy the body scanners while he had a financial interest in the company selling them. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
In all seriousness, I've noticed a shift towards even more commercial-oriented headlines (company X is selling nifty new product Y!) and inflammatory summaries and article titles since CmdrTaco left. I sincerely hope this is the result of a small sample size and not a sign of things to come.
Of course, there are still some third-world shitholes where people think that a witch-doctor rubbing feces on an open wound will ward off the evil spirits.
I'm not sure where you got that image of how those sorts of shaman/healer types do their jobs. They'll usually go with attempts at herbal treatment that have a chance of working that is slightly better than a placebo, based on learning from previous generations who figured out that rubbing feces on wounds was a good way to cause the patient to get even sicker and die. They tend to pick their herbs for apparent effectiveness, and often have chosen things with the right chemical compound or physiological effects, just not at as high a concentration or as good a delivery system as Western medicines.
Those healers from isolated tribes today, and our cavemen before us, were the brainy folks in their societies, and there's no reason to think they were any stupider than we are. They are just working with very limited tools, and are quite ignorant.
And if optical media would be obsolete, why would one want to continue using ISO files?
Well, not all BIOSes are smart enough to be able to boot flash drives, so we still need some older-school tools to carry around Linux installers.
There's another option:
3. He's an intelligence agent for either a government or business assigned to spy on Wikileaks, and then given the order to discredit them and take them out of commission without creating any martyrs. As a side effect, he might be setting up Openleaks to be a honeypot making it nice and easy to catch those trying to leak to the public.
After all, as President Obama has made repeatedly very clear, the bombs dropped on Libya were part of a humanitarian mission, not a war.
To add more evidence to this, consider how well Carly Fiorina has been treated in the press. When she was running for public office, all the press was on how she was a successful businesswoman who knew how to make an organization successful, despite all the evidence that the opposite was true.