BrianC wrote:Access to the "digital fief" comes at the cost of exorbitant rents. Varoufakis notes that many third-party developers on the Apple store, for example, pay 30% "on all their revenues", while Amazon charges its sellers "35% of revenues". This, he argues, is like a medieval feudal lord sending round the sheriff to collect a large chunk of his serfs' produce because he owns the estate and everything within it.
BrianC wrote:There is "no disinterested invisible hand of the market" here. The Big Tech platforms are exempted from free-market competition.
BrianC wrote:And in the meantime, users are unknowingly training their algorithms for them —
BrianC wrote:Approximately 80% of the income of traditional capitalist conglomerates go to salaries and wages, according to Varoufakis, while Big Tech's workers, in contrast, collect "less than 1% of their firms' revenues"...
BrianC wrote:Varoufakis....challenges us to come to terms with just what has happened to our economies — and our societies — in the era of Big Tech and Big Finance.
is like debating whether fentanyl is a good recreational drug. The dumb ones will shoot it up all day long and those with a modicum of intelligence will go nowhere near it. Amazon etc may have a monopoly, but only with the useless eaters.Markets have been "replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets
theluckycountry wrote: Amazon.... mostly it sells crap chinese product.
Plantagenet wrote:so anyone in the world can now buy things directly from anybody else in the world.
Pops wrote: by renting labor at a discount
If Amazon is too big it isn't Amazons fault, they are obviously doing capitalism right.
Pops wrote:Capitalism by definition is simply private ownership of the means of production— as opposed to state ownership.
thanks to a new method that big-box stores are using to game the tax system, Marquette Township owed a $755,828.71 tax refund to the home improvement chain Lowe’s. Essential services like the library, the school district, and the fire department were on the hook to pay for it.
Marquette has been hit hard by a tactic that the country’s biggest retailers are using to slash their property taxes. Known as the “dark store” method, it exemplifies the systematic way that these chains extract money from local governments...
Marquette is one of the countless places that has bought into big-box economic development. Over the years, the township in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan spent millions extending water mains, law enforcement, and other infrastructure and services to its big-box commercial corridor along U.S. 41...
Then, less than two years later, Lowe’s flipped the script. The mega-retailer, which reports annual net sales of about $50 billion, went to tax court to appeal its property tax assessment. Marquette had pegged the taxable value of the store, which had just been built for $10 million, at $5.2 million. In front of the Michigan Tax Tribunal, an administrative court whose members are appointed by the state governor, Lowe’s won assessments that were, instead, $2.4 million in 2010, $2 million in 2011, and $1.5 million in 2012.
“We honestly thought there had been a mistake,” says Dulcee Atherton, the assessor for Marquette Township. “We had the building permits that said it was worth $10 million. We couldn’t believe the audacity, really.” What was worse was the methodology that Lowe’s, and the tax tribunal, had used to arrive at the lower figures...
Pops wrote: Fully half the population regularly votes to eliminate all regulation and taxation on corporations, even as far as blessing them with more human rights and personhood than they do entire races of actual humans.
mousepad wrote:More than half the population voted it's ok to kill babies.
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not.
"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
https://mises.org/library/gdp-tool-poli ... -economicsWhile the industrial revolution may have sparked an interest in national income accounting, ultimately political forces and world economic events shaped modern GDP. During the Great Depression, British economist Colin Clark and American economist, Simon Kuznets, were charged with producing national income accounts. Kuznets’ numbers showed an economy that had been cut in half between 1929 and 1932. President Roosevelt cited the figures in announcing the new recovery program and subsequently used supplemental figures for in budget proposals. According to Coyle, the GDP numbers validated FDR’s desire to act (p. 13).
Though Kuznets is credited with generating the first national income accounts, they did not reflect a method he desired to use. Kuznets wanted to create a measure that could be used to understand welfare, not simply output. He thought advertising, financial industries, speculative activities, subways, and certain types of expensive urban housing, among other things, including government spending ought not be included (p. 14). However, these original definitions of national income would show the economy shrinking if private output available for private consumption was used for government action.
...These methodological changes and simple revisions to previous GDP calculations can be the source of major political and economic events. As an example, Coyle cites the 1976 crisis in the UK. Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey abruptly requested an emergency loan from the IMF. Upon a simple revision of the GDP numbers, Healey commented, “If we had had the right figures, we would never have needed to go for the loan.” Based on these comments, Coyle speculates: “Who knows whether Mrs. Thatcher would have won the same kind of election victory if her predecessors in power had not had to bring in the IMF?”
Austrians have long been critical of how increased government spending may very well stimulate the economy, and boost GDP numbers, but at the cost of malinvestment. Coyle explains a similar mechanism is at play in the financial sector:
...Hence, banks that take on more risk contribute more to GDP; Coyle points out that so far as GDP is concerned, more risk is counted like more growth. Therefore, current GDP methodology not only encourages malinvestment by only considering present spending, but also encourages malinvestment by favoring risky investments.
jato0072 wrote:I wouldn't consider the Republican Party as far Right, but it doesn't help that the Chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) Ronna McDaniel is Mitt Romney's niece. The Republican Party needs to be replaced by something actually Right Wing.
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