There is a school of thought that differentiates “economic” monopolies from “abusive” monopolies. The former are simply. the result of doing things better and so are rewarded with a bigger market share. The latter are consciously formed by monetary bullying and end up abusive of people - because they can.
Examples of economic monopolies could be those mentioned here - or Standard Oil of the early 20th century. SO came by its monopoly because Rockefeller organized the distribution system so efficiently and was thus able to offer is product at a lower price because his cost was lower. Had he attempted to gouge the market, he would no longer BE the best priced oil/gas supplier. Indeed, by the time Taft came after SO for monopolistic position, local companies had figured out Rockefeller’s system and reproduced it, now becoming competitive with Standard Oil.
Amazon eg. holds its market position by offering good (relatively) products at good prices, to include the shipping. We often neglect consideration of shipping costs yet those can substantially increase a product’s price. Ammo purchasers have long been sensitive to this phenomenon.
Other products like Google offer great products, but because they choose to invest some of their excess profitability into particular political positions, they lose customers who don’t agree and are tired of the Left playing politics with what should be plain economic things. The Left has left the political field so toxic that they alienate many who would otherwise simply look at the politics as “differences of opinion”, not terminal battlefields.
I just can’t take these guys seriously since they can’t take their own premise seriously:
We believe in the actual Scientific Method and enlightenment values of free discourse and challenging the authority of experts.
We believe, as Richard Feynman said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
If they can’t have sufficient humility with regard to their social theory aka “beliefs” to propose self-disciplinary measures such as I have (e.g. Sortocracy and, failing that, at least applying their own infotech power to Hume’s Guillotine) then they just don’t make the grade, however much “expertise” they may claim in asserting their social theory based on their “credentials” that take the form of capital accumulation.
Hey, I’m not saying capital accumulation isn’t a fantastic credential compared to a Harvard PhD (especially nowadays), but must I really damn them with such faint praise?
Let’s play the monopoly game. You name a market monopoly, and I’ll name a government-supported monopoly. Last party to name a monopoly wins. You can choose who goes first.
I always win the monopoly game, because a market monopoly is a rare and fleeting thing, a unicorn if you will.
In neither case is a free market still operating. The benefits of price competition have been lost. Doesn’t matter why a monopoly developed or why it is maintained.
That is simply not true. Economic “monopolies” exist in a market environment because of efficiency. Were they to drop out of the market and price-gouge, they would no longer be “competitive” so would lose business.
Look at WalMart. They managed to drive out-of-business many Mom-‘n-Pop stores in smaller towns. However, they did not then proceed to use their “position” to price-gouge the people. A real monopoly would. Furthermore, they are still just as sensitive to competition from any source that can match their efficiency, though that usually means a larger company. Target does. Sears and K-Mart couldn’t get their organizations in order and lost, just like the little guys.
You name a property right and I’ll name a government-enforcement of that property right.
Oh, wait, what is a “government”?
While I’ve got my problems with “Libertarians”, at least of the neo-kind (in contrast with Lysander Spooneresque paleo-kind), I’ve also got my problems with these neo-limits-to-growth guys:
Neither side of this “debate” possesses sufficient critical thought to understand that the real debate is between two modes of violence:
Sexual reproduction
Asexual reproduction
We’ve previously discussed this in:
Sexual reproduction’s violence takes the form of what we call “individuals” in individual vs individual fights over resources – most critically fertile females.
Asexual reproduction’s violence takes the form of eat-or-be-eaten armies in the form of what we call “groups”, whether the pre-Cambrian cellular clone mats, the eusocial insects of the last 100 million years or the nascent asexuality of primate group conflict of the last 6 million years.
There is no escaping these two modes of violence outside of mythic notions of utopia where the lion lies down with the lamb – the belief in which inevitably ends with Pax Parasitism’s replacement of force with fraud. (And, no, neo-libertarian rhetoric trying to define fraud as a form of force is just another form of parasitic sophistry.) Indeed, the sine qua non of eusociality according to E. O. Wilson is the parasitic castration of young.
Zamyatin’s We fictionalized that existing powers will alter
human nature by lobotomy-like operations on the brain. This
does not appear improbable, but to me it is a less disturbing
prospect than Huxley’s projection. In both We and Nineteen
Eighty-four the projected conditions are brought about by force.
That leaves room for optimism. So long as overt force is
necessary the doomsday does not appear inevitable; the need to
use force implies the existence of a latent opposing force. The
need to use force implies that the will to resist the trend has not
entirely disappeared.
Huxley’s book leaves no room for optimism. It shows a
bureaucratic system admired by the lowliest worker as greatly as
the highest administrator. The system has created a population of
what some would call “slaves”. However the “slaves” do not
have to be coerced. All will to opposition has been broken. They
love their servitude. When human animals have reached this state
it is a point of no return.
– “Brave New World: a different projection” by John Harland
Andreessen et al might be amenable to “Nature Preserve Earth”, especially since they seem more identified with Bezos’s rent-seeking ethos than Musk’s entrepreneurial ethos, and Bezos has been at least more vocal about Earth as a nature preserve. But are they willing to face the fact that domestication of wolves by everyman an alpha resulted in the reawakening of the 600M years of sexual selection leading to our heritable individualism that overcame the 6 million years of asexual selection in our primate line?
No. Of course not. This is all too “tendentious” for them to accept, despite the fact that everyone in Hollywood knows you don’t end an action movie without a mano-a-mano fight to the death as a profitable, if pornographic, degeneration of what caused the Cambrian Explosion of genuine diversity consequent to the limitation of migration of mating age males. Need to import more mating age males for that sweet sweet cheap labor!
In nature, predators benefit prey by feeding on the weakest
members of the population, thus strengthening the gene pool of
the prey. Parasites are far less discriminating than predators.
Parasites are careful to avoid killing their individual hosts by
focusing on the vital fluids, rather than killing for tissue.
Parasites are beneficial to neither the individual host nor to
the host’s gene pool.
In his opus, “The Discourses” Niccolo Machiavelli counsels the
founder of any new state to present tolerable challenges to the
people at all times, so as to strengthen their character. Either
the founder should locate in an austere land where nature herself
will provide discipline, or, if locating in a fertile area, the
founder should impose measured austerities on the people himself.
Machiavelli specifically mentions taxation as an attractive tool.
There is hidden morality in Machiavelli’s apparent ruthlessness:
At each stage of life, you have passed beyond dependence on that
which raised you to that stage. If you continue accepting what
was once given to you, it weakens rather than strengthens you.
If we follow Machiavelli’s wisdom and are consistent with the
ecological model of predator/prey dynamics, we should avoid
parasitic tax systems which drain off productivity in the form of
income, capital gains, sales and value added. We should instead
look for a tax policy that acts as a predator, applying
disciplinary pressure to the economy by measuring how effectively
business entities are utilizing their “living tissue” or net
assets. We should do so without violating nascent businesses and
families, as these are the fountainhead of wealth and value.
To that end, this white paper argues for the adoption of the
following policy reform:
The government should tax net assets, in excess of levels
typically protected under personal bankruptcy, at a rate equal to
the rate of interest on the national debt, thereby eliminating
other forms of taxation. Creator-owned intellectual property
should be exempt.
and leave sexual evolution in the biosphere to individual male intrasexual selection.
It is indeed a ploy, but it in no way indicates Google being successful enough to “take ethics seriously”. In actual fact, this is a tired leftist tactic: caution others that they must not undertake what the expositor is either already doing or is about to do. It is exactly the same thing as the dems’ Nazi brown shirts equivalents (who merely updated the fashion statement from historical neatly-pressed brown to slovenly black with accessory ski masks).
“Antifa” is merely the action arm of the democrat party’s effort to inoculate their puppet masters, so as to immunize them from recognition of their own wildly fascist strategy and actions. Since the MSM are all on board, this effort has been successful. Likewise, it is evil incarnate in today’s world to mislead masses of people by obvious manipulation of search results and shadow banning. Again, the “onboarded” MSM not only does not report it. Rather, they derogate those who do.
What is the result? “Our democracy” ™️, say the MSM is under perpetual threat by the “extreme right”, when, in fact, these same oracles deny even the existence of “extreme leftists”, who are, in fact perpetrating evil fascism 24/7 right before our eyes. If only “vaccines” against Covid were a tenth as potent at raising an immune response as “antifa”, google (sic), and the MSM at suppressing the accurate descriptors of our tyrannical rulers.
Property rights are not a government enforced monopoly. It’s convenient to leave your property and come back to not find squatters on it, but of course you could hire someone to guard your property while you were gone. In essence, that is one of the services you expect your government to provide, but as we’ve seen in multiple cases, a government won’t evict squatters.
Of course, Microsoft has been and remains a classic “restraint of trade” monopoly (or monopoly wannabe) through strategies such as the 1990s bundling of Internet Exploder as an “inseparable” component of Windows, thus torpedoing competing browsers on their platform, and bundled pre-installation licensing deals which forced vendors to pre-install Windows (and all of the other crap, such as Orifice preview editions) on every system they sell to obtain a favourable license price without which their systems wouldn’t be competitive if the customer had to pay for an individual license for the Microsoft junk. I have been calling this the “Microsoft Tax” since the early 2000s.
They’re still up to it, as you can see from my Roswell.fourmilab.ch system narrative for 2023-09-23 where I had the audacity of nope to try to install the Google Chrome browser on a new pre-installed (no delete option) Windows 11 system.
Hey Bill maintained that the browser wasn’t a browser it would be defined as an operating system.
This video is a highlights video and so I don’t know if it includes Bill trying to say that Microsoft’s browser wasn’t a browser at all.
I watched the whole interview which is several hours long and I don’t recall which one has the browser debate. For some reason, I got mesmerized by the guys willingness to lie while obviously thinking he was outsmarting the interviewer by using technical jargon or crap distractions. A Bill Clinton type performance. It goes something like this: You received an email with this information. No I didn’t. Shows the email. That email doesn’t contain what you said. Reads what it said. The email doesn’t say that. What did I just read. At Microsoft we use a xyz system with techno jargon and more techno jargon. All to try to maintain that an email is only what is typed by the author of the email so embedded information, attached or forwarded information isn’t an email. Did you read this information? I don’t know I get so much information. This email is from person X which was your direct report correct? Person X used to work over in the z department and then he worked in the y department. Ok was he your direct report when he sent you this email. I cannot recall if he had that job at that time. This email is dated 2 years ago. Was he your direct report on that date? Sally Y had the job of …
My point being perhaps best illustrated by that paleo-libertarian icon, Lysander Spooner’s quote:
All legitimate government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily agreed upon by the parties to it, for the protection of their rights against wrong-doers. In its voluntary character it is precisely similar to an association for mutual protection against fire or shipwreck.
What invariably happens to this arrangement is the geometric economy of scale that makes territorial area increase as the square of its boundary (more or less) – granting a de facto monopoly on force over contiguous territorial areas that bound each other. The thing that most libertarians (paleo and neo alike) fail to comprehend is that such patchwork territories go back to individual male intrasexual selection that arose just after predation appears in the fossil record – there by reducing interdeme gene flow and thereby increasing the rate of speciation (ie: explosion of species diversity). This is why, as an alternative to mano-a-mano individual combat as the appeal of last resort in dispute processing, I’ve offered Sortocracy’s rules regarding assortative migration, with prohabition on prisons but absolute tolerance of any kind of exclusion for any reason whatsoever by a group occupying such a “patch” of territory (the value of which is allocated on a per capita bidding basis).
I’ve thought this through quite thoroughly and it is about the closest that we can come to a compromise between genuine individual sovereignty and civilization as we would like to know it given the reality of the human animal.
Such is “journalism” in the 21st century. A person who chooses to separate his professional career from commentary on controversial contemporary issues has his identity dug out by a “reporter”, graduate of Harvard “Law” “School”, whose previous employment was at BuzzFeed, Spotify, and Facebook, and smeared all over the slimy slick pages of Forbes, which used to call itself a “Capitalist Tool”.
Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google quantum computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon who founded a stealth AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022. Forbes first identified Verdon as Jezos by matching details that Jezos revealed about himself to publicly available facts about Verdon. A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person. Forbes is revealing his identity because we believe it to be in the public interest as Jezos’s influence grows.
“We believe it to be in the public interest”, eh. And thus they defend this violation of the author’s privacy with this sanctimonious statement,
(Revealing the name behind an anonymous account of public note is not “doxxing,” which is an often-gendered form of online harassment that reveals private information — like an address or phone number — about a person without consent and with malicious intent.)
Well, I think that you, dear smirking Emily, deserve to spend 18 hours in the public pillory somewhere South of Market in San Francisco, where those you expose to public scorn and retribution can respond to your “journalism” with the wilted vegetables of disapprobation.
I would not think of “doxxing” Emily—why, that might be considered “gendered”—but seeing as she’s published her E-mail (ebakerwhite@forbes.com or emilybakerwhite@protonmail.com) at Forbes, why don’t you drop her a line and tell her what you think of her “journalism”?
An alternative hypothesis would be that the Forbes piece is “earned publicity” as part of a public relations effort to promote the effective accelerationism ideas. Most of the promoters of that concept come from Silicon Valley and know a thing or two about stimulating demand.
I did as you “suggested”. Here is what I sent her:
" Dear Ms White,
What you did to Jezos/Verdon IS DOXING - in it’s basest form. It was revealing someone’s private information merely for your and Forbes profit. Shame on you. Whole sections of the Federalist Papers were written under pseudonym for the purpose of stimulating discussion without the bias of a well-known name to colour things. You might do well to learn a bit of history before plunging into this mire as you did.
nes"
I sent it from my e-mail so she can see it’s a real person - who she doesn’t know.
