If the net neutrality repeal vote goes through

"

1453R wrote:

first of all my appreciation for actually providing salient and reasoned points to debate *from*. After twelve pages of schlock, it's a nice change of pace.

:-)

"

1453R wrote:

My stance is that Big Corporate inherently cannot be trusted. The Free Market only works if there are certain steelclad rules in place to ensure fair competition, and Big Corporate has been working tirelessly to undermine those rules for as long as Big Corporate has existed. You say that both Dems and Repubs are corrupt? I agree! The whole lot of them are thoroughly bought and paid for - but who did the buying?

Corrupt politicians don't erupt from the ground like those fucking worm-spewing Pit Maw bastards in Abyss. They're made, not born. Corruption stems from an external source twisting the decision-making process in a way that is not true to the politico's mandate to work in the best interests of his constituents, and since he can be investigated, charged, imprisoned, and generally have his life thoroughly ruined if he's caught doing that, there's only really one way to make it worth his while to risk all of that Bad Schitt.

And that is to be on the take. Which requires there to be an entity he's taking from. And that entity is always and invariably Big Corporate.

My first major point of disagreement is here. I don't see lobbyists as a monolith devoted to a single entity, but as representing a diverse array of liberty-hating scum, with less than 2% worthy causes but still enough to make the ingredients list. There's corporations that hate each other (ex: Microsoft and Apple), foreign governments, and individuals like Soros and the Kochs who are beholden to no board of directors. So no, not invariably. The swamp is more complicated than that.

I'm skipping your corporate decision-making digression.

"

1453R wrote:

The only entity in the entire world that stands a chance of forcing Big Corporate to fucking behave - and they need to be forced, there's no chance in Hell that 'voluntary compliance' will last longer than it takes to say the words, not with MORE MONEY on the line - is the government. This is, of course, hard for them to do when Big Corporate has essentially purchased the government and only Congressional inertia is stopping them from doing whatever.

This isn't true. When you can get two businesses actually competing for the same customers, such that customers actually have a choice, each of the two businesses have an incentive to be less shitty than the other. Fair contests tend to produce valid winners. When conservatives talk about capitalism, what they mean is free market competition, which is something corporatists loathe and try to destroy — they don't want competitors free to compete against them.

Not only is free market competition another way to reign in corporatist abuses, it is by far the cheapest. You need to understand that enforcing laws takes manpower, manpower costs money, and that corporations will use manpower of their own to dodge enforcement efforts. The good news is that battles that would obviously be lost are rarely fought, so a government that could credibly threaten overwhelming enforcement would deter most actual attempts at lawlessness and save money on enforcement that way, but it still requires a vast reserve of resources to use as such a deterrent. This is impossible to maintain relying solely on government to fix business malfeasance. We *need* self-regulating systems.

The problem is that free market competition is fragile and thus requires a certain legal infrastructure. Anarchocapitalism is a contradiction in terms because anarchy is impossible; when there is no government of the people, a government not of them will fill the void. (Interestingly, ancaps tend to understand this concept perfectly in regards to gun control but can't understand that banning government doesn't stop criminals from forming governments.) In other words, it is not enough to say "there will be no Left, because we ban it" — there must always be a LichKingeft, and if it isn't under the control of the people it will be formed and controlled by those who would violate (what should be) the rights of others.

The single most important function of government, therefore, is monopolistic sovereignty. If a private economic entity plans on forming a government, the people's government should stop them from doing so. Which brings us to the next quote.

"

1453R wrote:

Personally, I believe that business should be as separate from government as Church is from State - if you're a businessman you do not get to be a politician or government official as well. Not without renouncing your business ties, and not without investigation to make sure they're cut. Business doesn't get to donate shit to political campaigns, and if a business or a businessman is caught trying to pay a government man, for any reason, then the businessman is the one who gets thrown in jail forever, not the government man. Or at least not just the government man.

As I just stated, we definitely do want to separate private enterprise from government. However, we cannot separate government from business, because it is one: government has revenue in the form of taxes, a payroll of employees to investigate, arrest and prosecute lawbreakers, management to hire, fire and conduct performance reviews, etc.

Furthermore, speech is inherently driven by self-interest because it is a form of work. Because messaging consumes human time, it isn't free. People say things that benefit them to offset the cost of speaking, and the more a person, or group of people, is willing to spend on messaging, the more they will. Although the vote itself may be purely egalitarian, making the discussion surrounding that vote perfectly egalitarian is contradictory to human nature and impossible. It can only approach egalitarianism to the extent the populace believes in classical liberal values, such as the concept of tyranny of the majority and the individual as the smallest minority.

"

1453R wrote:

Corporations are not people.

They are groups of people. I'd be careful about dehumanizing corporations too much. Not all corporations are bad; some are; some are downright evil like the Mr Robot stereotype. It's a mix of morality, just like the groups of people they are.

"

1453R wrote:

The government exists to serve the People. Says so right in that fancy documajigger a bunch of dudes in funny wigs signed 'bout two hunnert-fitty years ago now. The interests of the People should be paramount and sovereign over the interests of Big Corporate. If this is so then the individual people who make up Big Corporate, who are in fact part of The People, will benefit right alongside the rest of us. This is in fact the only way for society to thrive. Anything that places the interests of a nebulous organization or ideal above the interests of the individual citizen, the most fundamental unit of society, inevitably gets us in trouble.

Which, in a long-ass winded manner, gets us back to Neutrality. Ajit Pai is a businessman who was appointed to a position designed primarily to be a check on businessmen - does it surprise anyone that he's turned out to be a total goddamned shill? This vote has no benefit whatsoever to the People, it gives us nothing and does not improve our lives at all. What it does do is allow Big Corporate to get their predator on and come up with new and inventive ways to bleed us of our money without regulatory interference.

As I said earlier in this thread,
I disagree as far as mobile broadband is concerned; I think there's enough free market competition in mobile carriers to justify exempting them from net neutrality. To that extent, I agree with (former Verizon board member) Pai's decision and much of his reasoning. But(t) fuck Comcast.

"

1453R wrote:

Always recall that your satisfaction is not, and never was, Big Corporate's goal. They do not give a single fat frog fuck if you're satisfied with their service or product. They could not care less. The ONLY thing that matters is that you pay for the service or product in the first place. Once they have your money, you can fly and go f*** yourself so far as Big Corporate is concerned. It's why they work so hard to subvert the steelclad rules of free and equitable competition that The Free Market relies on - it's so much easier for them to simply squash competing services and drown out alternative options than it is for them to actually try and create a service or product you're happy to pay for. Why work their butts off to make you happy when they can exert a tenth of the effort and expenditure on simply ensuring they're the only game in town?

Under free market competition, these two things — getting customer money and meeting customer needs — are connected to each other; without free market competition, they aren't. For cost reasons, we need free market competition. Therefore what you say cannot remain true; if it does, we fail.

"

1453R wrote:

The proof? The mere existence of Comcast, which by all the laws and theories of free market capitalism that The Conservative Right swear by should have long since collapsed in flames under the sheer weight of universal hatred their customers feel for them. But they're still here. They're still a multibillion-dollar company who Ajit Pai is trying to give free and clear permission to do whatever they want. Why people think Comcast has more motivation today to be a better group of people than they had in November, I cannot presume to know.

But whatever the reason is, they're wrong.

Comcast exists because it has received special favors from government on the municipal, state and federal levels. You're certainly correct there are faux-capitalist shills pretending to be conservatives who defend Comcast; they are wrong indeed. Cable internet, and cable in general in the US, is obnoxiously monopolistic.

I am against the policies of sweetheart land deals that allowed Comcast to essentially steal land. But I'm not sure how to fix it. I'm definitely not against running Comcast like a title 2 utility, since they're basically using government land. I'm just fine with reinstating net neutrality for cable broadband. Just not mobile broadband.

It really seems like people do not realize that landline internet is going to be as obsolete as landline phones soon.

In another 10-20 years most people will just have a phone for internet, and Comcast will mostly just be serving businesses and people who choose to live in the middle of nowhere.

Seems stupid to use massive resources to regulate some industry that is about to be obsolete.

"

Kamchatka wrote:

It really seems like people do not realize that landline internet is going to be as obsolete as landline phones soon.

In another 10-20 years most people will just have a phone for internet, and Comcast will mostly just be serving businesses and people who choose to live in the middle of nowhere.

Seems stupid to use massive resources to regulate some industry that is about to be obsolete.

Landline internet won't be obsolete so long as desktop computers remain more powerful, more useful, and more user-friendly than phones are. If you like playing games on a big nice high-resolution monitor, with your mechanical keyboard and your multi-button MMO mouse and your big fat comfy headphones, then you'll be on desktop and that desktop will need an internet connection.

No, running internet to the desktop off the phone is not an option. And even if it was? It's all the same companies running the same shit. Why do you figure the mobile carriers are any better than the landline guys?

"

1453R wrote:

No, running internet to the desktop off the phone is not an option.

Nonsense. About the only thing mobile broadband can't handle is online action gaming. You've got PC master race tunnel vision if you think Comcast doesn't have multiple competitors in your area... because mobile broadband does compete with Comcast in Normistan. Most people get by just fine with 4G.

"

1453R wrote:

And even if it was? It's all the same companies running the same shit. Why do you figure the mobile carriers are any better than the landline guys?

Because they have a decent degree of free market competition. Sprint is willing to fund messaging that points out the flaws in Verizon, etc, such that the industry regulates itself, checks and balances style.

I still think net neutrality should apply to Comcast, because I don't think gamers as a class should be without consumer protections when the services their hobby relies on don't generally have free market competition. But this connection speed elitism thing is nowhere near an everybody issue — it's a special interest group thing, applicable to gamers and some other premium users but not to the general public. To me net neutrality is actually a lower priority than forcing developers to disclose lootbox odds (yay Apple). And rambling on about how this issue is important to "everybody" is like saying "everybody" cares about lootbox odds disclosure. Spoiler: they don't.

I would only add to this, Jennik ignored the part where I said 10-20 years from now. Obviously I am referring to technological advances that will happen in this time.

Also I can already use my phone hotspot to play some online games on my laptop without issues. Clearly 10-20 years from now Phone broadband and hotspot technology will improve enough to play Pretty much all online games on your computer without need of comcast.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

My first major point of disagreement is here. I don't see lobbyists as a monolith devoted to a single entity, but as representing a diverse array of liberty-hating scum, with less than 2% worthy causes but still enough to make the ingredients list. There's corporations that hate each other (ex: Microsoft and Apple), foreign governments, and individuals like Soros and the Kochs who are beholden to no board of directors. So no, not invariably. The swamp is more complicated than that.

I'm not sure how this is any better, really. The end result is still the same - assholes buying bad decisions from the politicos. Big Corporate has the most buying power by far, and so Big Corporate tends to be responsible for both the most and the worst Bad Bought Deals. The fact that other people confuse the pot just means we need even more reform than one might otherwise assume.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

This isn't true. When you can get two businesses actually competing for the same customers, such that customers actually have a choice, each of the two businesses have an incentive to be less shitty than the other. Fair contests tend to produce valid winners. When conservatives talk about capitalism, what they mean is free market competition, which is something corporatists loathe and try to destroy — they don't want competitors free to compete against them.

Not only is free market competition another way to reign in corporatist abuses, it is by far the cheapest. You need to understand that enforcing laws takes manpower, manpower costs money, and that corporations will use manpower of their own to dodge enforcement efforts. The good news is that battles that would obviously be lost are rarely fought, so a government that could credibly threaten overwhelming enforcement would deter most actual attempts at lawlessness and save money on enforcement that way, but it still requires a vast reserve of resources to use as such a deterrent. This is impossible to maintain relying solely on government to fix business malfeasance. We *need* self-regulating systems.

The problem is that free market competition is fragile and thus requires a certain legal infrastructure. Anarchocapitalism is a contradiction in terms because anarchy is impossible; when there is no government of the people, a government not of them will fill the void. (Interestingly, ancaps tend to understand this concept perfectly in regards to gun control but can't understand that banning government doesn't stop criminals from forming governments.) In other words, it is not enough to say "there will be no Left, because we ban it" — there must always be a LichKingeft, and if it isn't under the control of the people it will be formed and controlled by those who would violate (what should be) the rights of others.

The single most important function of government, therefore, is monopolistic sovereignty. If a private economic entity plans on forming a government, the people's government should stop them from doing so.

The government's most important function is to exist enough to stop other governments? I'm not entirely sure what you're driving at here. 'Government', in this country, is explicitly laid out as being the crystallization of the will of the People, an entity which is able to perform necessary actions that the People as a whole cannot. The American people cannot directly negotiate with the Russian people to settle things like trade disputes. The American people cannot directly raise a military to protect itself from hostile invasion, or speak its displeasure with situations like the ISIL war. Government is meant to act as a focus for functions which America as a country must do, but which the entirety of its people cannot feasibly manage. Part of that is ensuring that certain individual members of the American people do not prey upon others less able to defend themselves. This applies to the criminal justice system, which exists to suppress uncivil activity and ensure the peace and security of the American people (to the best of its oftentimes limited ability).

No such system exists to stop corporate predation, however. There is no criminal justice code for businessmen, despite the fact that businessmen routinely make decisions that damage or destroy hundreds, thousands, or millions of lives.

An organization which is specifically constructed as being the closest we can get to the incarnate will of the American people should have priority over organizations which are specifically constructed to be the closest humanity can get to the incarnate form of greed. Which would be Big Corporate.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Which brings us to the next quote.
...
As I just stated, we definitely do want to separate private enterprise from government. However, we cannot separate government from business, because it is one: government has revenue in the form of taxes, a payroll of employees to investigate, arrest and prosecute lawbreakers, management to hire, fire and conduct performance reviews, etc.

There's a difference between an organization which earns a profit as a means to an end, i.e. the government, and an organization for which profit is the only possible and conceivable end, i.e. Business. The former is able to make enough money; they don't need to constantly push harder harder harder harder harder HARDER to make more and More and MOAR profit, the way Big Corporate does. A nonprofit group is at least theoretically capable of setting up a mechanism by which it makes the money it needs to do what it exists to do, and no more.

Big Corporate? They specifically say, all the time: "if you're not growing you're shrinking." If they're not constantly increasing their margins, in a manner which is physically unsustainable - it is factually impossible to grow without limit eternally - they consider themselves to be 'dying'. In my eyes this is actual, literal madness. How any group of educated people can believe themselves able to create something that grows forever is beyond me. The world is a zero-sum place until and unless we start getting out into space. There's only so much growth out there. And remember that too much growth, uncontrolled and ungoverned by any external mechanism, is often referred to as 'cancer'.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

They are groups of people. I'd be careful about dehumanizing corporations too much. Not all corporations are bad; some are; some are downright evil like the Mr Robot stereotype. It's a mix of morality, just like the groups of people they are.

Corporations are not people. They should not be treated the same as regular citizens, the way they keep pushing. If you can't walk up to it, shake its hand, and offer to buy it a coffee for a few moments' conversation, it's not a person. Has nothing to do with Good or Evil. People can be good or evil. Groups of people trend towards the lowest elements among them. Corporations require different laws than one would apply to a person.

Unless we're willing to start actually charging corporations with the innumerable crimianl offenses they commit every single day in their normal course of doing business?

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

As I said earlier in this thread,
I disagree as far as mobile broadband is concerned; I think there's enough free market competition in mobile carriers to justify exempting them from net neutrality. To that extent, I agree with (former Verizon board member) Pai's decision and much of his reasoning. But(t) fuck Comcast.

To be fair, I don't use Comcast. They're not in my area. I am, however, stuck with one single ISP, who is not really much better than Comcast service-wise. Constant slowdowns, poor network maintenance, extremely slow service in the physical, "we'll-be-there-in-two-weeks" sense, artificial bandwidth throttling, the works. And we're giving this company free permission to Make Everything Worse...why?

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Under free market competition, these two things — getting customer money and meeting customer needs — are connected to each other; without free market competition, they aren't. For cost reasons, we need free market competition. Therefore what you say cannot remain true; if it does, we fail.

And there's the rub.

A small, new company can easily adjust its methodology and service to Please The Customer. They cannot easily strangle competing companies; they just don't have the pockets, the sheer mass, for it. They're nimble and flexible and advertise themselves as such, hoping to leech off the customer base of the larger existing companies.

If they're good at it? They succeed. They build their customer base, and they grow. They turn from a small start-up into a respectable mid-sized player in their field, with the depth to provide extra stability to their customers and enough lingering flexibility to try and meet the core needs of their core customer base.

If they're good at it? They succeed. They grow. They become an industry leader in their field, a Giant. It becomes extremely difficult for this ponderous organization to flex its business; they're set in their ways, they have a Method, and they don't deviate from it. They no longer have the flexibility to adapt to their customers' desires...but what they do have now are the deep pockets and sheer weight to buy out or strangle the small, nimble start-ups that can offer a better experience to THEIR customer base. They become exactly the same thing they once fought their hearts out to replace, they're just as horrible to work with as what they replaced, and the buggerest thing of it all?

They did it to themselves. Consistent success turns a business people might've once liked and trusted into a monolithic megacorp which has utterly forgotten what it means to give a shit, because they've gotten to the stage where it's cheaper and easier by far to simply strangle their competitors whilst steadily and systematically abusing their customer base.

It's an endless cycle of buttfuckery. The bigger a business gets the shittier it becomes, and success does nothing save cause a business to grow. This is why we need strong antitrust and anti-monopoly laws. The only way to stop the cycle is to break these companies apart before they get to the Monolithic Megacorp stage, shatter them into pieces and turn them back into Little Guys who can't survive without showing at least some slight modicum of give-a-fuck.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Comcast exists because it has received special favors from government on the municipal, state and federal levels. You're certainly correct there are faux-capitalist shills pretending to be conservatives who defend Comcast; they are wrong indeed. Cable internet, and cable in general in the US, is obnoxiously monopolistic.

I am against the policies of sweetheart land deals that allowed Comcast to essentially steal land. But I'm not sure how to fix it. I'm definitely not against running Comcast like a title 2 utility, since they're basically using government land. I'm just fine with reinstating net neutrality for cable broadband. Just not mobile broadband.

You and me both, at least insofar as the being-against of sweetheart deals. Comcast needs to be dismantled completely and its uppermost ruling cabal executive team should possibly be drawn and quartered, but that won't stop the problem. Running these companies as Title II utilities is correct because that's what they are. Until they're somehow not, they get to deal with the restrictions as well as the sweetheart benefits.

As for mobile broadband? It's as thoroughly awful as landline service. I am less pleased with AT&T than I am with fuckin' Sjoberg's, but all the other mobile carriers in my area are just as shit, and every single one of them has "severance penalties" in their contracts that run up to and possibly include "in the event that you decide to cancel your service with us, we will send a team of masked men to your house shortly afterwards. They will proceed to beat you unconscious with heavy iron bars, and after they're done with that they will messily remove your liver via garage surgery. If you survive this process, we will send you pictures of your liver being sold on the black market. This is all perfectly 100% legal, so don't complain. Only after this point will we take your desire to terminate your service with us under consideration."

Because nobody ever told mobile broadband that it goes against Free Market Economics to brutalize your customers for changing their mind, or deciding you're a shit service with shit support and they'd like to try something else. Nobody ever told them it's not cool to lock a person into a ten-year contract that they automatically renew every time they pay a monthly bill. Nobody ever told them that artificially degrading the performance of devices and services a customer has paid for without informing them you're doing so in the hopes that their frustration with their inexplicably newly-shit existing device/plan will drive them into making a new purchase they did not otherwise need to make, ISN'T THAT RIGHT APPLE?

Why, exactly, aren't we telling these people that it's not all right to do these things?

I just switched mobile service, and the new company paid the termination fees and what I still owed on old phone. Competition works.

This is Day 12 without Net Neutrality. I will be posting in this thread every day until all the doom and gloom that the left promised would happen actually does happen. Remember, we were told our internet will now come in packages and we will have to pay every time we dl something or post on a forum. As of today that has not happened. So far they are liars. We'll see how tomorrow goes.

"

pannra wrote:

This is Day 12 without Net Neutrality. I will be posting in this thread every day until all the doom and gloom that the left promised would happen actually does happen. Remember, we were told our internet will now come in packages and we will have to pay every time we dl something or post on a forum. As of today that has not happened. So far they are liars. We'll see how tomorrow goes.

How about “This is Week 2. . . I will be posting in this thread every week. . .”

Pwease?

"

1453R wrote:

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

My first major point of disagreement is here. I don't see lobbyists as a monolith devoted to a single entity, but as representing a diverse array of liberty-hating scum, with less than 2% worthy causes but still enough to make the ingredients list. There's corporations that hate each other (ex: Microsoft and Apple), foreign governments, and individuals like Soros and the Kochs who are beholden to no board of directors. So no, not invariably. The swamp is more complicated than that.

I'm not sure how this is any better, really. The end result is still the same - assholes buying bad decisions from the politicos. Big Corporate has the most buying power by far, and so Big Corporate tends to be responsible for both the most and the worst Bad Bought Deals. The fact that other people confuse the pot just means we need even more reform than one might otherwise assume.

I am talking about what is here, not what ought. Is it better? Irrelevant.

"

1453R wrote:

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

This isn't true. When you can get two businesses actually competing for the same customers, such that customers actually have a choice, each of the two businesses have an incentive to be less shitty than the other. Fair contests tend to produce valid winners. When conservatives talk about capitalism, what they mean is free market competition, which is something corporatists loathe and try to destroy — they don't want competitors free to compete against them.

Not only is free market competition another way to reign in corporatist abuses, it is by far the cheapest. You need to understand that enforcing laws takes manpower, manpower costs money, and that corporations will use manpower of their own to dodge enforcement efforts. The good news is that battles that would obviously be lost are rarely fought, so a government that could credibly threaten overwhelming enforcement would deter most actual attempts at lawlessness and save money on enforcement that way, but it still requires a vast reserve of resources to use as such a deterrent. This is impossible to maintain relying solely on government to fix business malfeasance. We *need* self-regulating systems.

The problem is that free market competition is fragile and thus requires a certain legal infrastructure. Anarchocapitalism is a contradiction in terms because anarchy is impossible; when there is no government of the people, a government not of them will fill the void. (Interestingly, ancaps tend to understand this concept perfectly in regards to gun control but can't understand that banning government doesn't stop criminals from forming governments.) In other words, it is not enough to say "there will be no Left, because we ban it" — there must always be a LichKingeft, and if it isn't under the control of the people it will be formed and controlled by those who would violate (what should be) the rights of others.

The single most important function of government, therefore, is monopolistic sovereignty. If a private economic entity plans on forming a government, the people's government should stop them from doing so.

The government's most important function is to exist enough to stop other governments? I'm not entirely sure what you're driving at here. 'Government', in this country, is explicitly laid out as being the crystallization of the will of the People, an entity which is able to perform necessary actions that the People as a whole cannot.

The government is made of people. Seems silly to say people can't do things that the government does. I think it's more accurate to say that government can use the threat of imprisonment and/or fines to change the incentives of its citizens such that they not only produce more than they otherwise would have, but enough to cover the costs of investigating, convincting and punishing violators and still be a net profit.

I said it's important to stop criminals from forming governments, and that's true to an extent, but it's not really most important. I take that back. Still, it's obviously not good to have undemocratic governments wandering around.

"

1453R wrote:

The American people cannot directly negotiate with the Russian people to settle things like trade disputes.

Why not? What's stopping one American from making deals with one Russian?

"

1453R wrote:

No such system exists to stop corporate predation, however. There is no criminal justice code for businessmen, despite the fact that businessmen routinely make decisions that damage or destroy hundreds, thousands, or millions of lives.

There are laws against some forms of corporate malfeasance, and agencies to enforce them. You're talking out your ass here.

"

1453R wrote:

An organization which is specifically constructed as being the closest we can get to the incarnate will of the American people

There is an organization that is closer to the incarnate will of Texans than the federal government. And there is an organization that is is closer to the incarnate will of Houstoners than the Texas government. And there is an organization that is closer to the incarnate will of a Houston family than the Houston government.

The collective human will isn't this unidirectional force you make it out to be. Real human desires go in nearly every conceivable direction, with plenty of both agreement and disagreement. You can try to order it with pattern recognition, and there are indeed patterns to be found within the tangle, but the overall gestalt of the thing is chaos, not order — division, not unity. Trying to simplify the collective will as being in any single direction is not only inaccurate — it opens the door for some serious tyranny of the majority.

"

1453R wrote:

There's a difference between an organization which earns a profit as a means to an end, i.e. the government, and an organization for which profit is the only possible and conceivable end, i.e. Business. The former is able to make enough money; they don't need to constantly push harder harder harder harder harder HARDER to make more and More and MOAR profit, the way Big Corporate does. A nonprofit group is at least theoretically capable of setting up a mechanism by which it makes the money it needs to do what it exists to do, and no more.

I like your phrasing. Sure... theoretically. Not so much in current practice.

"

1453R wrote:

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

They are groups of people. I'd be careful about dehumanizing corporations too much. Not all corporations are bad; some are; some are downright evil like the Mr Robot stereotype. It's a mix of morality, just like the groups of people they are.

Corporations are not people. They should not be treated the same as regular citizens, the way they keep pushing. If you can't walk up to it, shake its hand, and offer to buy it a coffee for a few moments' conversation, it's not a person. Has nothing to do with Good or Evil. People can be good or evil. Groups of people trend towards the lowest elements among them. Corporations require different laws than one would apply to a person.

Unless we're willing to start actually charging corporations with the innumerable crimianl offenses they commit every single day in their normal course of doing business?

I'm not exactly a fan of treating a corporation as a distinct legal person either, but they are certainly groups of shareholders, and shareholders are legal people. As groups of people, corporations deserve the rights one would normally extend to groups of people, to include civil rights.

"

1453R wrote:

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Under free market competition, these two things — getting customer money and meeting customer needs — are connected to each other; without free market competition, they aren't. For cost reasons, we need free market competition. Therefore what you say cannot remain true; if it does, we fail.

And there's the rub.

A small, new company can easily adjust its methodology and service to Please The Customer. They cannot easily strangle competing companies; they just don't have the pockets, the sheer mass, for it. They're nimble and flexible and advertise themselves as such, hoping to leech off the customer base of the larger existing companies.

If they're good at it? They succeed. They build their customer base, and they grow. They turn from a small start-up into a respectable mid-sized player in their field, with the depth to provide extra stability to their customers and enough lingering flexibility to try and meet the core needs of their core customer base.

If they're good at it? They succeed. They grow. They become an industry leader in their field, a Giant. It becomes extremely difficult for this ponderous organization to flex its business; they're set in their ways, they have a Method, and they don't deviate from it. They no longer have the flexibility to adapt to their customers' desires...but what they do have now are the deep pockets and sheer weight to buy out or strangle the small, nimble start-ups that can offer a better experience to THEIR customer base. They become exactly the same thing they once fought their hearts out to replace, they're just as horrible to work with as what they replaced, and the buggerest thing of it all?

They did it to themselves. Consistent success turns a business people might've once liked and trusted into a monolithic megacorp which has utterly forgotten what it means to give a shit, because they've gotten to the stage where it's cheaper and easier by far to simply strangle their competitors whilst steadily and systematically abusing their customer base.

It's an endless cycle of buttfuckery. The bigger a business gets the shittier it becomes, and success does nothing save cause a business to grow. This is why we need strong antitrust and anti-monopoly laws. The only way to stop the cycle is to break these companies apart before they get to the Monolithic Megacorp stage, shatter them into pieces and turn them back into Little Guys who can't survive without showing at least some slight modicum of give-a-fuck.

Although I tend to agree with your general description of the business life cycle, I disagree with the implication of inevitability. Yes, if a particular corporation grows big, it does become set in its ways and less responsive to customer needs... but there's an "if" in that sentence. It may collapse instead, or just tread water. Consistent success isn't guaranteed. A small or medium business might stay that size perpetually. And as a lover of decentralization and competition, I would honestly prefer they do.

Also worth noting is: how do big corporations strangle their competitors? (It's not by buying them out; this, by itself, only rewards those who create competing businesses, incentivizing the next entrepreneur to repeat the startup's success. But see intellectual property law discussion below.) If it's by offering a better product (by which I mean according to customer satisfaction, not the opinions of fringe moralists), then that's competition at work; if it's not by offering a better product, then presumably some arm is being twisted, which means it's not a free market. Any method one business can use to *coerce* another into nonexistence should be prohibited...

...but for the most part, such abuses are not prohibited by, but created by law. The more government is corrupted by corporatism, the less corporations have to gain by repealing fair-play regulations, and the more to gain from creating unfair regulations. The Democratic Party is a bigger threat than the GOP at this point.

One particular point of interest on that front is intellectual property rights. Fellow former SkyCore doesn't believe they're actual rights, and I'll admit that from a free-market perspective they're... problematic. If inventing something yourself gives you right to a government-enforced monopoly over said invention, well, that's a legalized monopoly, and likely to be abused. The counter-argument is that said invention wouldn't even exist without the inventor, which is fair enough I guess for a little bit of legal monopoly time... but when does it end? The continued expansion of IP laws to stretch corporate ownership of patents and copyrights seemingly into eternity is frankly appalling from a free-market perspective. When will Mickey Mouse finally enter the public domain? How long should the estate of a novelist collect royalties?

Now ask yourself: where are the big media companies, Hollywood, book publishers, music industry... where do their campaign contributions go? Do they appear to have a left-wing bias or a right-wing one?