telecom monopolies are government enshrined, so not capitalism. Negative externalities of burning fossil fuels (plastics are a fossil fuel product) are allowed because government allows people to pollute "some"... not capitalism.
Perhaps the defenders of capitalism should have to account for the effect their economic system has on the government and its ability to properly regulate the economy given the immense private wealth that the owners can use to influence policy and politicians. It is an economic and political system, not purely an economic system.
You're conflating free markets with capitalism. And once laws are influenced by capitalists, the market is no longer free.
And this is again a failure of government, not capitalism. As an analogue, you cannot say that socialism is a flawed system purely because of what happened in russia-you must not mix up economic and political philosophies.
The free market determined that that was the fair price for government policies to be bent towards industries' or actor's will. You'll forgive people critiquing the economic system if it freely and naturally leads to the ills we find objectionable.
And on the contrary, I absolutely do hold the failure of the Soviet system against central planning and command economies, even socialist ones. Given that, I find democratically-executed socialism using markets for prices (some consider this market socialism) much preferable.
You can if your complaint (as above) is that the economic system has adverse effects on the political system or vice versa. Would you claim you shouldn't attribute the resulting explosion to water when you pour it on sodium because one is a liquid and the other is a metal?
Telecom monopolies are not by government intent by rather by regulatory capture.
As a capitalist, I hella want to exclude others from the market. If I can get the government to do this for me, then I'm willing to pay the lobbyist fees to make that happen. In the IP space the only reason I'm willing to slave away at invention is the possibility of a patent, a right to exclude, a limited monopoly.
As a capitalist, the absolute last thing I want is a free market. Thiel puts it this way: competition is for losers.
OP is saying that government allow a certain amount of pollution.
A government could decide to forbid pollution altogether (whatever that means) and still maintain a capitalistic economic system.
We have generally forbidden dumping barrels of spent oil in rivers, for example.
Likewise, a non-capitalistic system can forbid or not pollution.
They were government regulated until that didn't work, then broken up. After the subsequent deregulation, the monopoly is in the process of re-creating itself now.
I think that may be a picture of phone lines when they were point to point i.e. each connection had a dedicated line rather than going through a switch. I don't think it had anything to do with thousands of telecom companies.
"Under Theodore N. Vail from 1907, AT&T had [...] acquired many of the independents, and bought control of Western Union, giving it a monopolistic position in both telephone and telegraph communication. A key strategy was to refuse to connect its long distance network — technologically, by far the finest and most extensive in the land — with local independent carriers. Without the prospect of long distance services, the market position of many independents became untenable. Vail stated that there should be "one policy, one system [AT&T's] and universal service, no collection of separate companies could give the public the service that [the] Bell... system could give.""
Societal norms forced him to resign. In other parts of this world with more patriarchal and authoritarian governments the leadership style might have been accepted.
You're catching a lot of flak for this, but as long as there is diverse competition, you're right.
I used to bounce back and forth between Uber and Lyft based purely on price, but now I almost exclusively use Lyft because I'm not a fan of some of Uber's practices.
capitalism -- an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
So you are saying that the investors, i.e. the capital, pressured Kalanick out for reasons of profit rather than due to pressure by the state in the form of multiple lawsuits. You are mistaken.
In particular, there is no evidence that Uber's naughty bro culture is any less profitable than a mature egalitarian culture. Lack of profit wasn't why Kalanick was shown the door.
I would imagine they've seen a revenue decline from all the bad press. Furthermore, there's no way he wasn't directly involved in the Otto lawsuit, which isn't the governments doing.
According to recent reporting in Bloomberg, there was a temporary dip in market share due to the #deleteuber campaign, which has since recovered. Both companies have grown considerably over that time period. Lyft's ridesharing growth in the U.S. has been much higher than Uber's.
The Waymo lawsuit is still very much up in the air. Kalanick's involvement is already public: he collaborated with Levandowski to acquire a team of self-driving-car engineers and their work over 8 months. The key demands of the Waymo legal team were rejected in their injunction. Judge Alsop did not see a clear nexus between the Waymo designs and the Uber lidar, referring the matter to trial.
>According to recent reporting in Bloomberg, there was a temporary dip in market share due to the #deleteuber campaign, which has since recovered.
Based on what? Uber isn't public, they aren't forced to release any information on their ride sharing, and what info they do release isn't subjected to any real verification.
The only article I see is based on "number of app downloads" - that has literally no relevance in the number of rides they're servicing. I've got Uber on my phone and I haven't used it in 3 months and I don't see that changing anytime soon. They didn't lose me outright as a user, but they, for all intents and purposes, lost my business.
The article had some numbers leaked from Uber. It should surprise you when some information isn't public these days, considering the volume of leaks from that company.
I have not been keeping up with the news surrounding Kalanick or Uber, so this is an honest questions.
Did the courts say that Kalanick is barred from being the CEO of Uber? Or, is it the case that Kalanick's actions have put Uber at risk fines and further litagation?
My (admittedly uninformed) take on the situation is that Uber's investors weighed the costs and benefits and determined that Kalanick needed to go. While the regulatory environment probably influenced the decision, it wasn't the government calling the shots.
I'm actually separating the issues rather than conflating them.
Capitalism by itself looks at profit. In the United States capitalism is held in check by a legal+political+free speech system. A company (Uber) is not held in check by more capitalism; it is not held in check by competition. As an aside, this breaks down with regulatory capture.
When VW cheated on its emissions testing it was not checked by a more efficient and competitive Tesla. It was held to account by a legal system external of capitalism.
We are not saying the same thing. His investors asked him to step down for a reason and that reason was not profit or rather lack thereof; they've had ample profit reason to fire him for years. The reason the Uber board asked him to leave was not a capitalist reason.
I'm not sure why you seem to deny the possibility that capitalists are concerned with future profits as well as past ones. You say their reason was not lack of profit, based I guess on the fact that they haven't suffered any major setback beyond their normal lack of profitability in the past couple of quarters. That's an oddly restrictive definition.
Capitalism is about future profits, by definition. I can't invest money in Apple in 1997. I have to invest it today, and my only concern is what happens after that investment. The Uber boarding kicking him out is entirely a capitalist reason. They've invested money, and his presence will (they believe at least) negatively affect the return on that investment going forward.
It's just a blatant fact that Kalanick wasn't axed because of his inability to turn a profit. That card has been left on the table for quite some time by board inertia in the vain hope that this unicorn would grow wings. Instead, Uber lost $2.8B last year. That isn't rational.
Your only concern may be what happens after an investment but you'd be foolhardy not to take past performance into account. Undervalued (Apple in 1997, return of Steve) is one thing. Throwing good money after bad is another.
$2.8B is just a ton of money to lose and for a startup it's insane (thinking of Amazon but Uber's losses dwarf Amazon's early losses). Frankly, I think the board is using this as an excuse to do now what they should have done a couple of years back. Boards are human. They aren't homo economicus incarnate. Ascribing rationality to the outcome of a board meeting because capitalism makes no sense. Really, they lost $2.8B last year.
> It's just a blatant fact that Kalanick wasn't axed because of his inability to turn a profit.
No one is suggesting that. When people say "this is capitalist of the board to do" they're talking about the individual board member profiting from a successful exit. Put more simply - investor puts $1 in Uber on day 0 and expects to make $100 on day 1,000 and makes a $99 profit. They're axing TK because they want to make their $99 return on investment.
By allowing it to willfully break laws in dozens of countries, contributing to lowering standards of living and high stress at work, tracking users at all times, having a hostile workplace, then becoming the most important provider of such services in the world?
Yeah, that's totally capitalism doing its work, and not the painfully obvious "throw VC money at it until it works" scheme, right
