OK Bloomer.
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I assume the people whose inventions Edison stole were nice people. I guess they were not billionaires though whoops
My fave was “you can’t train people to do tech jobs, they’re just not wired that way,” as if the only smart ones leapt from the womb writing code?
You only get that rich when network effects (or some other mechanism) grants you a de facto monopoly. Monopolies generally suck.
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Retraining programs have a very low success rate. Still it sounds fucking terrible and is a great demonstration of why he won’t do well.
This is an accurate read for the top 10 richest people on earth basically. The only exception is Buffett, but that’s because his company is a huge conglomerate of radically different businesses rather than a monopoly.
Honestly Buffett became a billionaire by being very good at picking stocks… and by providing people who founded companies a safe haven from the whims of Wall Street and myopic focus on short term results.
I think most of my affinity for Buffet comes from the fact that I think he’s mostly earned his money in a pretty decent and fair way. At the same time he owns a lot of stock in banks and has been a shareholder of Coca Cola for a long time… and I recognize that in 20 years Coca Cola may be perceived as being as bad as the Tobacco companies.
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Agree. Monopolies are the cancer of capitalism. A heathy capitalist society needs to be always and actively fighting monopoly.
and thus billionaires are a market failure and shouldn’t exist.
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https://twitter.com/bill_maxwell_/status/1192834812500774912?s=21
Trump and Burnett need to ditch the whole “Apprentice” model altogether and just have Trump interview celebs and politicians on topical interests whilst they stand in front of a running helicopter. It’s new, it’s fresh, it’s interesting, it’s even got an element of suspense to it because at any moment the host and/or guest might need to cut off the interview and sprint to the choppa.
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Monopolies are the result of capitalism working properly!
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How much fuel does one of those things even hold? Would be a real shame if it just ditched into the potomac as soon as he boarded because he left the rotors running so long…
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I agree billionaires are a social and political failure but they are not a monopoly in any sense the word is normally used and they certainly are not a market failure. They are the inevitable result of an unchecked market. The failure is political.
The “normal” use is ridiculously outdated if so. Facebook is a monopoly, it wields monopoly power in the marketplace. Any definition that disagrees is a faulty definition.
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@tabbaker No monopolies are the biggest drawback of capitalism. Capitalism is obviously a deeply flawed system, much the way pure socialism is. The right answer is some mixture of socialism and capitalism rather than either/or. Monopolies should either be government run not for profits because there isn’t a viable way to have competition, or they should be illegal. Most of the positive impacts of capitalism come directly from competition, so monopolies are antithetical to that.
@JohnnyTruant Agreed we are reaching a stage where the unsustainable stuff in the current meta will end. How it will end is still up for debate, but the choice to do nothing is really the choice to abdicate any control over how those changes will manifest themselves, or mitigate how bad the damage will be. There will be a lot of damage at this point to both innocent and guilty parties alike almost no matter what, but there are better options and worse ones. Doing nothing is mostly opting for the worst ones.
@clovis8 Yeah government bears a lot more responsibility for the current meta than socialists want to admit. Capitalism has a ton of responsibility though. Turns out letting a bunch of super powerful people pursue their own interests at the expense of everyone else’s is really bad for the integrity of government.
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So you want to prevent monopolies for some reason, but not do anything about the problems they have caused leading up to this point?
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If you go to the tape it was actually Dinesh D’Souza’s statement, Maher just agreed with him.
Naturally Maher got fired and Dinesh got to make himself a career as a right wing thinker.
I’m pretty sure I never said anything like that?
Bill Gates, eh? I used to say he was evil. After he left Microsoft and set up his foundation and started to fund good causes I moderated my opinion somewhat. Trump with that amount of money would be a shitshow (not as bad as Trump as POTUS obv).
The philanthropic choices Gates has made are different than I’d make but if even one of his long-shot energy investments cold fusion pans out, he will have more than made up for the evil he’s done.
Warren comment, though. Wtf man.
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Free market fundamentalists should actually read Adam Smith instead of just saying “the invisible hand” like it’s gospel. He criticizes monopolies more than anything else and wanted government to prevent them.