This. For skilled workers, it's still a lot of money if you can't get a job at the other FAANG companies. In the few miserable years you'll be there, you can make a lot of progress towards buying/paying off a house, for instance. If you have a thick skin to not care about a PIP and just shrug off the nonsense, it might be a really good deal.
it's monopoly, in professional setting in most cases is no possibility to use something else even if alternative tools is better for your specific task. It really similar to case of MS Word decades ago, now we have choose but not in the past.
Figma had chance to grow later to level where it could become Adobe competitor, now it's no hope that would be any competition any time soon.
Just to illustrate why I think that. Usually Adobe software used for everything so is no escape in most cases, but Figma became so widespread in popular specific case so it could really transform situation in way: use Adobe for everything but for UI/Web use only Figma. In that way everybody become committed enough to Figma ecosystem and they as company can start offering new tools which will able to capture Adobe businesses bit by bit.
Every dominant piece of software is its own monopoly as long as the documents have a proprietary format and there exist no independent readers/writers.
Note the regulator phrases the concern, not as "monopoly", but as "substantial lessening of competition (SLC)".
In particular, page 6, item 25:
> We consider that Adobe’s and Figma’s platforms are characterised by network effects. These network effects cause the value of the respective platforms to increase with the number of users. These strengthen Adobe’s position in vector and raster editing software. They also strengthen Figma’s position in product design software. Network effects operate across markets. For example, the value of using Figma’s vector and raster editing offerings is greater the more Figma is used for product design, and vice-versa. Therefore the strength of the Parties’ positions in each of these markets is influenced by their strengths in the others, implying that the Parties exert multi-market competitive pressure on each other across vector editing, raster editing, and product design.
Page 9, item 41:
> The Parties identified more than 45 competitors in vector editing and more than 65 in raster editing. We undertook an assessment to identify the most relevant competitors in each of vector and raster editing software. We considered the extent to which these competitors are referred to in the Parties’ internal documents and in third-party evidence. We consider that very few competitors in vector editing software (Affinity and Corel Draw) and raster editing software (Affinity) provide any meaningful competitive constraint on Adobe’s product development for professional users, and that constraint is weak to moderate at most. This is particularly true for product design and related digital use cases
Sports also has rules. Can't pick up the ball and run across the pitch in association football. Can't use an anti-material rifle to knock the bails of the wickets in cricket. Can't respond to the Tennison Gambit in Chess with an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2xNlzsnPCQ
One of the economic rules in certain countries is "we like competition, don't thwart it".
Uh, yes? That is literally the entire reason competition regulatory bodies like the CMA exist. To prevent monopolistic behavior and ensure no single entity gets big enough to squash all competition.
Tell me you don't know about sports without telling me you don't know about sports.
There's a huge problem in most sports precisely because of money. Those that have the money have the best players, the best equipment, the best facilities etc. And yes, they spend money on exclusive contracts and deals so that others don't get the same.
Some sports even go as far as try and implement certain restrictions and limits so that money don't play such an outsized role
> How does this "hinder the growth of human development"
Easy. The larger any company gets, the more difficult it becomes to compete with them as customers of a potential competitor expect a certain set of features to be available to even consider migration, and thus the large company gets ever more and more market share over time. On top of that the large company may simply outspend a competitor in advertising or sue competitors for barely-legal patents.
Capitalism at its core is the ruthless elimination of inefficiencies, and competition is inefficiency (just look how many dozens of billions of VC were burned in the "gig economy" sector to get rid of competitors).
The problem for the development of humanity is that an entrenched, dominant/monopolist company has zero reasons to innovate and progress.
> Consumers always have the opportunity to switch.
For that, there needs to be an alternative option. Just look at Walmart and how they destroy small food stores in a massive radius around them as no small retailer can compete with their scale.
That's every monopoly in history. Any smart monopoly allows just enough competition to tread water to show regulators that "hey, look, there's competition, we're just dominant".
Because they commonly swap to profit extraction models when they fail to integrate the acquisitions, and after that they typically shutter otherwise viable businesses. Most recently seen with Unity and Weta Technologies
A friend of mine got paraplegic because a person in the back seat of a car wasn’t using a seat belt during a crash. The body got launched on my friends seat, killing her and breaking my friends spine.
People keep arguing about the left without thinking that this degree of income inequality is unsustainable. Liberals should be ashamed of what they have become. There’s no liberty when there’s a de facto Royal class, which are the extremely wealthy.
How is this a left/liberal problem? If anything, it seems like people on the left are more likely to talk about this problem, and - rightly or wrongly - advocate wealth distribution to fix it. Let's keep the conversation here curious, and leave the low-effort partisanship elsewhere.
I dont believe there is a partisan solution to the continuing trend. The curiosity I have is which of the non-political solutions America will pick.
How long till the unstoppable wealth elevator strands enough people at the bottom who are both armed and capable of building effective resistance? Course such things wont effect this group on this site, so best to stay curious, sip coffee and watch.
How is it not a left problem? Despite many issues in right leaning areas, red states basically rank way better on housing affordability. The article cites high housing costs as a causative factor in homelessness.
> red states basically rank way better on housing affordability
Do they? They tend to have cheaper housing in absolute dollar terms, but that has to be weighed against the job market - not for white-collar can-work-remote folks like us, but for folks at the lower end of the income scale in fields such as construction or retail. The OP cites results from Denver and New Orleans as well as New York and Boston. When it comes to homelessness, no state seems to be immune. I know people on the left tend to blame greedy landlords and developers, while people on the right tend to blame over-regulation and limited supply, but just blaming Biden (which satao did at the time I replied) without any supporting reason or facts seems like the kind of partisan pot-shot we shouldn't welcome here.
Usually when left and liberal are used in the same sentence, liberal means center left (clinton/obama) and left refers to progressives (sanders/AOC). I could be wrong but I believe this person is faulting the center left for not being left enough.
Wealth translates directly into political influence - just look at Alabama!
Also - consider that a good amount of wealth is locked up in real estate. Whoever falls in that bucket has political influence and no interest at all that more housing will be built, because that will diminish their wealth.
> Wealth translates directly into political influence - just look at Alabama!
Is this bad on net? From what I've heard, the main political difference between the rich and the rest of the population is that they tend to be more pro-business. That sounds like a good counterweight to the popular antipathy toward business.
> Also - consider that a good amount of wealth is locked up in real estate. Whoever falls in that bucket has political influence and no interest at all that more housing will be built, because that will diminish their wealth.
NIMBYism is overwhelmingly driven by non-rich people, and most people who are rich have most of their wealth in stocks, which gives them an incentive to favor the construction of housing as a complementary good. Again, I'm not seeing the harm here.
Personally I think absurd wealth inequality indicates at least two issues:
1) A lack of re-investment of positive economic activity into the “common good” (infrastructure, education, social services, etc) that were almost certainly instrumental in creating the environment for that wealth to grow in the first place.
2) An undemocratic concentration of political power in a small number of individuals
> 1) A lack of re-investment of positive economic activity into the “common good” (infrastructure, education, social services, etc) that were almost certainly instrumental in creating the environment for that wealth to grow in the first place.
The amount of money spent on those things, adjusted for inflation, has been going up over time in the US. Are we actually under-investing in those things? And how does wealth inequality indicate under-investment?
I think we are definitely under investing in infrastructure.
Amazon builds an empire on cheap-to-use interstate highways and we can’t take a train across the country in less than 3 days.
Bridges falling down, power grids starting wildfires, levees failing, towns with abysmal drinking water quality.
We spend more on healthcare with worse results than other countries, with private profits being skimmed at every step.
We have normalized needing a college degree on your resume for “entry level” jobs and graduating with tens of thousands in debt to achieve this checkmark.
I think it’s an indication because if you were paying back society as you prospered, these black-hole pockets of increasing wealth wouldn’t be so large or common.
Economic prosperity is great. But that was generated in the framework of our society and should be re-invested in it.
You're pointing at something real and important, but I think you've misdiagnosed the problem. We are spending more -- but we're getting a lot less bang for the buck, because costs in those sectors are spiraling out of control [1]. There's some structural reason why things like education are increasing in cost way faster than inflation, and that is what we really need to fix. Spending more money on those things is like bailing water out of the Titanic; it just makes the ship sink a little slower.
I'll take your "very rich" and primarily include billionaires and the extremely affluent in my following statement:
Billionaires shouldn't exist. They shouldn't. We should re-implement proper progressive tax rates (like the US had in the 50s), and ensure that that type of wealth can never happen again.
Billionaires should exist. They should. Just as reasonable.
People have this idea that if we could just harvest all of that money and spread it out, the problem would be solved. Fleece the billionaires. So let's run the numbers.
Currently, there are seven hundred fifty-six billionaires in the United States. I'll do 750 for ease of calculation. Let's say they have three billion each (this is wildly overshooting it, there's some power law and they probably average 1.5 billion, since for every Bezos there are likely fifty people at 1.1 billion). What we get is 2.250 trillion dollars.
We could throw that out to each person (say three hundred million people) for a one-time boon of $7,500. That's it, it's gone. Whoosh. A little more than our COVID payments. Nice to have. Or, you could do about two years of our United States budget deficit. Or you could even knock a little over seven percent off of the $30.93 trillion US debt.
My question is: now that you've harvested the billionaires, what do you do next year? What's the follow-up? Be sure to include the knock-on effects of a lot of slightly less wealthy people hustling their money out of the country.
Billionaires are a glittering distraction to the crabs in the bucket. Hauling them down to your level is satisfying in a monkey way. It isn't much of a solution, though.
The Soviets thought the same thing, but on a different scale. They thought that peasants who owned two cows shouldn't exist, so they sent every peasant who owned two cows to the Gulag in order to re-educate them about equity. Taxation is theft, my friend.
Support among the US political class for copyright and patent law runs so deep that the main argument for untangling our economy from China's is not "they undercut US labor" or "they manipulate their currency" but "they steal our IP". An interesting choice of words, because that's an exclusive 'we'[0]. US voters have little need for copyrights and patents beyond ensuring that creative works get made. But the US political class is utterly dependent on their continued existence.
BTW, this even extends to Trumpism. Trump was very vocal about China stealing "our IP." The US economy is structured such that you cannot become rich without owning copyrights, patents, oil fields, or real estate. Everything else will be thrown into the abyss of partial post-scarcity.
[0] In some languages (not English) there's an inclusive 'we' and an exclusive 'we'. The latter would be used with the same implication as, say, "We've won the lottery - except for you."
I'm not sure if you meant "you cannot become rich without owning copyrights, patents, oil fields, or real estate" literally or not, but it's not really true in any case. There are plenty of people (doctors, dentists, lawyers, software engineers, small business owners) who become wealthy without owning any of those things. Not as wealthy as those who do, perhaps, but wealthy nonetheless. I'm one of them--a lucky IPO that occurred a few years after I started working at my current employer turned me from an indebted paycheck-to-paycheck engineer into someone who could retire tomorrow and still live a decent middle-class lifestyle on my investments. I didn't own real estate until I after I got rich.
You benefitted from that IPO likely because you owned (shares of) profitable IP which, given the company went public, were likely protected by copyright and/or patents.
Being in that class of people, I’d contend Felix Dennis’ view of what wealth is is poor.
It may take a decade or two, but individuals in these professions who work at top tier roles will be wealthy by any reasonable measure (7-figure investment portfolios and no bad debt is “wealthy” to anyone without a very uninformed understanding of what the word means).
I'll rephrase the above comments: having seven figures of assets or income confers material wealth but not political control. Political capital is far more expensive. At a minimum, you need so much money that hiring a team of lobbyists to confuse your local congresscritter is a petty cash drawer expense. Ideally you will also want to forefeit your right to privacy and become some kind of a public figure.
A case study here would be Louis Rossman: rich enough to run a MacBook repair business but not rich enough to bribe/tip Congress into passing a right-to-repair law.
Australia has ranked choice voting and it has not resulted in Australia making better decisions. I'd argue that in muddling the level of preference between options by overquantizing things, it biases elections towards the status quo and a complete lack of change, and motivates the two main parties to minimize (or eliminate) their differences.
It can be better to pick the one you like most rather than to sort a bunch of candidates, some of which will be inauthentic and strategic, evenly along a continuum. In a field of nine, that transforms the number one candidate from being preferred over the number nine candidate to being nine times better than the number one candidate.
I think there's a reason that Australia requires that you rank all choices. If you don't, it spoils your vote. If you intentionally spoil your vote, that's actually a crime in Australia (don't listen to people who tell you that the least Australia requires is that you turn in a blank ballot; Australia disagrees.) You're not even allowed to ask people not to rank certain candidates. It is a jailable offense:
> In 1986 Albert Langer wrote a conference paper entitled Don't Vote, examining possible electoral strategy for the left, aiming to bring down the Labor government and to target ALP candidates in marginal seats. In 1987 and 1990 there were instances where Victorian voters were urged to take advantage of section 270 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act and give less preferred parties equal last preferences (now known as a Langer vote), so as not to express a choice for either major party.
> As a result of his imprisonment, Amnesty International declared him the first Australian prisoner of conscience for over 20 years.
Ranked choice (and obligatory) voting inflates the support for status quo parties. It's also a way to make that pesky 40% who don't vote because they hate both parties disappear.
> If you intentionally spoil your vote, that's actually a crime in Australia
Incorrect.
Spoilt votes are legal and non criminal - spoil your own vote as much as you like.
> Albert Langer
wasn't convicted of spoiling his vote.
He advocated everybody spoil their votes, and handed out "how to not vote" flyers
He was asked not to, there was a court case, an appeal, an injunction against Langer, a deliberate violation of that injunction, an arrest for violating that injunction, a sentence, that sentence halved, a review of the law created to mess with Langer, and then that law was tossed out.
So ..
Never a crime to spoil a vote in Australia.
Briefly "illegal" to advocate others do so (during one election).
That's no longer the case.
> I think there's a reason that Australia requires that you rank all choices.
Only in the House of Representatives - where you order a small number of choices to choose a candidate to represent your local district.
Senate votes (the other House) only require to rank six parties (out of a field of potentially many) OR rank 12 individuals (out of potentially many more)
>> If you intentionally spoil your vote, that's actually a crime in Australia
> Incorrect.
I warned you not to listen to Australians about this. It's some kind of folk rebel legend that they're not required to vote completely. They are. Beware of "corrections" without references.
-----
> The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, under section 245(1), states: "It shall be the duty of every elector to vote at each election".
> Under the Electoral Act, the actual duty of the elector is to attend a polling place, have their name marked off the certified list, receive a ballot paper and take it to an individual voting booth, mark it, fold the ballot paper and place it in the ballot box.
> It is not the case, as some people have claimed, that it is only compulsory to attend the polling place and have your name marked off, and this has been upheld by a number of legal decisions:
High Court 1926 – Judd v McKeon (1926) 38 CLR 380
Supreme Court of Victoria 1970 – Lubcke v Little [1970] VR 807
High Court 1971 – Faderson v Bridger (1971) 126 CLR 271
Supreme Court of Queensland 1974 – Krosch v Springbell; ex parte
Krosch [1974] QdR 107
ACT Supreme Court 1981 – O'Brien v Warden (1981) 37 ACTR 13
> Because of the secrecy of the ballot, it is not possible to determine whether a person has completed their ballot paper prior to placing it in the ballot box. It is therefore not possible to determine whether all electors have met their legislated duty to vote. It is, however, possible to determine that an elector has attended a polling place or mobile polling team (or applied for a postal vote, pre-poll vote or absent vote) and been issued with a ballot paper.
> He advocated everybody spoil their votes, and handed out "how to not vote" flyers
Which is somewhat true, although the conference paper was called "Don't Vote." It was a witty title, because it wasn't about not voting, but marking voting papers in such a way that you could avoid ranking the two biggest parties. I don't know why you think that it would be a crime to advocate for a legal act, but you do you.
But consider that what I said was "You're not even allowed to ask people not to rank certain candidates. It is a jailable offense."
> Never a crime to spoil a vote in Australia.
This is a falsehood. Currently a crime to intentionally spoil your vote in Australia, currently not ranking all choices with spoil your vote.
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>> I think there's a reason that Australia requires that you rank all choices.
> Only in the House of Representatives - where you order a small number of choices to choose a candidate to represent your local district.
You got me. I think there's a reason that the House of Representatives requires you to rank all choices, and that the Senate only requires you to rank what is likely to be all vaguely viable choices (as power rules go.)
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> You really don't appear to know much about the Australian Electoral system.
You seem to have gotten everything wrong about Australian voting except to point out that the Senate only requires you to rank the top six parties or twelve individuals out of a selection that could be larger. Seems like very little to be gloating about, but, again, you do you.
Thanks for the interesting context. I will have to read further on mandatory voting or mandatory ranking of all candidates, but as it is, first past the post in the USA always leads to voting for the lesser evil.
I never get to vote for the person representing the policies I want, but rather voting against the handful of policies I do not want.
My trouble with it is that I think it's a distraction that allows people to feel like their voice is heard, but actually makes status quo results more likely because it simply shifts your vote to one of the two status quo parties.
I'm deep into P2P collaboration in terms of implementing aids for deliberative assemblies, or even complete implementations of different kinds of deliberative assemblies. When you study this stuff, you find first that it's still a very loose and new field of study that hasn't quite come together yet. Next, you find that there's a split: some people are trying to figure out the practicalities of implementing traditional deliberative rules in new mediums, aided by all of our cool devices, and even to experiment with those rules when things assumed by them have changed due to technology, e.g. asynchronous deliberation, or instant recall of delegates, etc..
On the other side are the "deliberative polling" people. They present themselves as looking for some sort of innovation in randomly selected focus groups, and ultimately, as looking for ways to essentially split a citizenry into focus groups, and to use those combined focus groups to either wield power as a government, or, more often, to advise a government. It sounds laudable, like a Delphi Method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method) for non-experts.
But this is until you read their papers, and notice that the way they evaluate the conclusions of their deliberative group experiments is by how well the conclusions the groups reach agree with their hand-picked experts. Then you notice that what they're actually doing is figuring out frameworks that can guide randomly selected groups of people into predetermined conclusions. It's literally manufacturing consent by maximizing the feeling of participation that people have in ratifying decisions already made. Then you finally realize why Cass Sunstein is interested in it. They want to build a nation of grand juries.
I see ranked-choice voting as a similar tactic. It allows people to express their feelings without any danger that those feelings will have any effect.
edit: I'd also like to point out that in the UK, which has a long recent history of complaining about their FPTP systems, has more viable parties than the US even with FPTP, such as the Liberals who have been around forever (although they've only been "Liberal Democrats" since the SDP split from Labour), the SNP, and even single issue Brexit parties. Even their major parties, such as Labour, are to a degree composites, including things like The Labour and Co-operative Party.
The reason the Democrats and Republicans are the only real choices is because they fixed the rules, like e.g. against "fusion," which makes it so parties like Labour and Co-operative can't even exist outside of New York. The insane requirements for qualifying to run, the absence of campaign finance regulations, the fact that the government hosts their internal primary elections and marks parties on the ballot sheet... there are obvious ways to keep these awful parties from a lock on power, and they will not be done because these awful parties make the rules.
