Is reclaimthenet.org a real news website? None of the writers looks real and I can't find any information on the website on who edits it and fund it. Some articles reek of bias
>But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation.
In which way is Google innovative? They have good products for sure, but I haven't seen much innovation at Google since a while. If anything the past few years have been mostly disappointing (Loon, Calico, Fiber, etc)
That's a measure of reputation, not innovation. Nobody denies that they have a reputation for innovation, but reputations are by necessity backwards-looking.
That's just incorrect, take the famous marxist Adam Smith:
"When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters."
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." - From 'The Wealth of Nations' by Adam Smith.
Smith was actually right. Every economist would agree that he is right. The problem is just that you don't understand him.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
The point is that they conspire as long as they want, they will not succeed. Smith understood that.
Also, Smith was quite a bit more sophisticated when it came to human behavior, see his other book "The Theory of Moral Sentiment".
> The point is that they conspire as long as they want, they will not succeed. Smith understood that.
No, actually, Smith understood that they regularly did succeed, and wrote directly in warning about that; from the conclusion to Chapter 11 of Book 1 of The Wealth of Nations:
“The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”
What are you talking about, he is making my point exactly.
> any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined
He was afraid they would use the state to create laws in their benefit. Not that they could use market power to beat competition. Nothing in this paragraph indicates that he thinks markets by itself were centralized.
The AntiTrust law is an exact example of what Smith is talking about. Its a proposal that looks like it would help markets but actually its a tool for the weak competition to beat the stronger competition.
Please provide any evidence that unregulated markets are not centralizing. Any market with economies of scale will naturally tend to fewer players, just like political systems that favor large parties (like the US system) will favor fewer parties.
Economics of scale is not a universal law that means bigger is always better. There is also the opposite effect where larger is bad.
The point of having a market is to find the balance between economics of scale and limit of the firm. The reason why economist want markets in the first place, is because that's how we find if it is more effective to have a few large players, like Airplanes, or millions of small players like Restaurants or Hotels.
The Soviet Union built the biggest Truck factory ever (or at least at that time), but it did not produce cost efficient Trucks. Why? They clearly had economics of scale.
As for evidence, I would start with "The Theory of the Firm" witch founded a hole new branch of economics and from there you have 60 years of research. There is a hole branch of economics called 'Industrial Organisation'.
The simplest bit of evidence is that you can literally just count the amount of companies that exist. If Marx was right we should observe fewer and fewer companies in a predictable linear process.
> just like political systems that favor large parties (like the US system) will favor fewer parties.
The US system may favor large parties but it not inherently centralizing. There is no tendency to a monopoly party.
Libraries could be much better if they stop focusing on the NYT best sellers list. They are starting to come around on indie books (and local community engagement), but it takes time. And, given how a libraries content budget works, a successful library book can suck out all of the budget. This is especially true if it is a book from a big 5 publisher with a high price tag.
Libraries and librarians tend to be more generalists, while niche bookstores and their employers are more focused. If I walk into a bookstore specializing in X then I can be pretty sure that the person working there knows a lot about the subtle differences in all the books about X. The same isn't necessarily true about libraries.
In my experience the books I wanted to read we're often already on loan to someone and I would have to wait for them to be returned or for them to get the book from another branch. It was particularly bad with series.
I was pretty excited by the fact that I could buy my own books when I got my first job. I still miss Borders.
I don't read a lot of stuff, so Amazon makes a lot more sense.
I'm just outside of the city limits, so a library card would cost me $130 / year. I don't spend much more than that on books plus Amazon ships it to me, so it's less expensive in the end.
In middle and high school, I lived just outside the curiously squiggly border of the nearest library, and they didn't offer a card at any price. I don't think I'm alone in that. Amazon would have been amazing.
I don't rent books. If they are good enough to read once I want to own the book and be able to refer back to it occasionally.
The three books I am deeply into right now are all a thousand pages and I have been reading two of them for around four months now, and just started the third. Libraries tend to get annoyed when you keep a book for over six months.
That said, I rarely visited used book stores anyways because they usually don't have the books I am looking for.
I mourn the decrease in readers in general. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly-few...
My problem with public libraries was always the miserable scifi section. I never understood that. Even the littlest bookstores had a bigger scifi section than the library. B+N had racks and racks of scifi.
You seem to be knowledgeable in this topic, maybe you know any good books about the other aspects of drawing you are talking about? "Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain" is mentioned often, but other books less so.
> The other test is to meet their significant other. What qualities did they choose in the person with whom has the most influence over them?
Am I the only one bothered by such a request? I wouldn't want to bring my SO, not only because I wouldn't want to mix my private and professional life, but also because it seems incredibly weird to me to have my private relationships being used to judge me.
I agree, and I find this incredibly invasive. I agree the "how they treat wait staff" test, and sharing a meal with someone to give you some idea of what their personality is like has _some_ merit in my experience, but no, you can't meet my SO or invade my personal life.
The fact this is even considered is appalling, let alone publishing a blog post about it.
Not really, the linux is a volunteer effort spearheaded by a non-profit where members take advantage of the advance of the kernel for their own products/ideals, while Google is very much a for-profit corporation which benefits here by the increase in users for their services. Services which are ad-supported for the most part.
yeah but how many of these K-12 educational chromebooks are going to get that installed on them? these just allow google to start tracking people even earlier in life than they may have otherwise been able to.
Once again, in what manner are these Chromebooks tracking people more than alternatives would? And I take it from your comment that you're implying Chromium OS tracks people less?
