Big Tech: The New Predatory Capitalism | Hacker News Reader

Big Tech: The New Predatory Capitalism

prospect.org

50 pointsuoaei13 comments

enegry, food, healthcare? is there a segment of the economy that couldn't use a little less market concentration.

I believe that's the real issue. Anti-trust enforcement has all but vanished in the past couple of decades. It seems government is simply no longer interested (or perhaps paid to be disinterested) in breaking up big companies. I'll go further and say that they are actively encouraging monopoly in certain cases (read: healthcare). The disastrous effects of this lack of enforcement are now becoming quite clear.

> A potentially bigger shift involves making data portable. Guy Rolnik and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago proposed in a recent New York Times op-ed that social media users should be able to re-route all their messages onto any platform, the way phone calls are re-routed regardless of whether AT&T or Verizon is the provider

> In the 2001 AOL-Time Warner merger, the FCC forced AOL’s market-leading Instant Messenger (AIM) to be compatible with chats from rivals.

I'm not sure how this would work these days. Looking at my Dock right now I have Slack (some open source communities use this for some reason, I also use it at work), Textual for IRC (freenode), Discord (some other open source communities use this, and gaming communities), WhatsApp (personal use), Skype etc

I remember common protocols like XMPP back in the day, but it looks like the closed systems have won hearts and minds

I know with Slack there is an IRC bridge option (though I've never used it as I only recently started using slack for work). I think there's possibly bridges for discord too. Point being that if you want to consolidate you probably can. Back in the day I used to Adium, which consolidated all of my relevant messaging services into a single app. I didn't use AIM or MSN or iChat's apps ever; I simply added credentials to Adium whenever I needed. Perhaps third party services could fill the gap here as well. They don't all have to use the same protocols so long as they all have similar levels of access and someone is willing to support the integration.

Most advanced healthcare , most surplus of food, variety and abundance of energy. Capitalism has made the most abundant and highest quality of products. Its ok if people cant afford certain things, its called costs. Surgeons are not slaves.

I love this idea that asking people to not become filthy rich off of needed services is somehow equivalent to enslavement.

Everyone has their motivations for their career choices and for some that motivation is being rewarded with wealth. Would we end up with a surgeon shortage if they were expected to only do it out of a sense of duty to their fellow man? Unfortunately the only way to truly know is to risk a reduction in the number of surgeons by removing wealth rewards. The obvious problem is that if the result is indeed less people motivated to be surgeons, healthcare outcomes for many will suffer.

The supply of labor is more like an infrastructural problem for capitalism, it's already a truly known and artificially influenced thing. In fact, with less concentration more people are going to be pushed to become surgeons, not less.

My one off comment doesn't really do justice to how I actually feel about the issue. I'll explain. No one should feel obliged to work for less than what they're worth. This is something my wife and I talk about lot actually. I just have a strong distaste for the hyperbole used when someone does suggest that someone else work for less. Particularly, if the person being asked to give something up has so much to begin with.

To address your example about surgeons. Perhaps they wouldn't need to same amount of "wealth rewards" if somehow we made it cheaper for them to become surgeons in the first place? Could the cost of their training be addressed? Changes to how malpractice insurance works?

You're being far too kind. I don't mind if people become filthy rich as long as they do it legally. It's supposedly illegal to not quote people prices before providing services, or to have discriminatory pricing. Yet hospitals (you know, that place where those surgeons work) do this on a daily basis and blindly screw people over.

I say "supposedly" because I have yet to see anyone in the medical industry go to jail for violations of the Sherman, Clayton, or Robinson-Patman acts. Mechanics and contractors tried these bullshit games decades ago and it was met with actual enforcement of the law and that's why we have binding estimates for these services now. They also cannot charge you different rates based on which insurance you have. Even more so, if they fail to properly fix something and you bring it back they are required to correct the problem at no additional cost because you already paid them to fix this issue (these occasional instances are supposed to be covered by increasing the quoted estimates to account for a small portion coming back for additional work at no charge). The same is not true in hospitals. Whenever these surgeons perform an operation and there is a complication like, for example, and infection - guess who pays for it. The patient. There is precisely one place that I know of that doesn't do any of this shit in the medical field - The Surgery Center of Oklahoma. They even post a price list. Here's one page: https://surgerycenterok.com/?procedure_category=knee#jump Keep in mind that these prices are not only far less than what hospitals charge, but this includes competitive wages for their surgeons (whom I'm fairly certain aren't slaves) as well as covering the cost of complications, which also provides every incentive for them to not infect you or have complications arise.

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