Politics 2025

[Elok]

When it comes to things that aren't groceries, Wal-Mart has even stronger competition, since they aren't bound by refrigeration and such.  Dollar General is everywhere if you still need it quick.  Amazon will ship you batteries from anywhere, at bulk rates.  In fact, I think we bulk-order batteries for various boy gadgets from Amazon.  Out of curiosity, I looked it up, and eight Great Value AA batteries are $3.77 on Walmart.com.  Haven't looked into S&H.  Skimming Amazon, you can get some no-name brand of AAs, 24-pack for less than $8, eligible for free shipping at variable times depending on member status and total order.  That strikes me as a fair amount of batteries!  How many batteries would you expect for this price, given inflation?

[Buster's Uncle]

No idea, and I wasn't keeping records of it back in the 80s - just, it weren't such a great deal anymore by the turn of the century.  I know that sounds weak and purely intuitive, but I'm not invested in this enough to do homework - guess you had to be there...

That's how monopolies work, though, and why they're bad.

Now, let me point out that you're fighting on the hill of Microsoft is not a monopoly, Walmart is not a monopoly - that a bad hill, my man.  It's built out of landmines, not dirt and rocks.

[Elok]

I legit don't know what you mean by the hill being made of landmines.  They're your examples, and I've argued this whole time that both of them face robust competition (I'd say Wal-Mart more so, but Microsoft is fighting over a much smaller bone than Wal-Mart these days).  The example of Microsoft is more illustrative precisely because most of today's tech giants were a couple of nerds in a garage when Gates was king--if they even existed yet.  This appears to be a remarkably competitive era; how much of that can be credited to government intervention?  And hasn't Senator Warren been complaining about the new giants just as much as people used to complain about Microsoft, even though (ISTM) all they did was fight their way to top of their respective hills in the face of stiff opposition?

I'd say that Amazon is much closer to a real monopoly in the US, in the sense that it is THE big online retailer.  But it's THE big online retailer because it's very hard to compete with on price and service!  I tried a couple of inflation calculators and they seem to agree that four bucks in '85 is about twelve now.  First hit on Amazon for AA batteries is a $15 48-pack from Amazon Basics.  I have no idea how much the cost of batteries has changed relative to anything else, but thirty-one cents a battery sounds fairly cheap.  Could four bucks buy roughly thirty-nine batteries forty years ago?  Beats me.

In the event that Amazon starts abusing its position by offering crummier deals and assuming people won't jump ship to Walmart.com, or ebay if that still exists, or whoever, I expect they will get a rude awakening.  And they will deserve it.  And five, ten, or fifteen years later people will be arguing that NewOnlineBehemoth is too big.

[Geo]

...  And five, ten, or fifteen years later people will be arguing that NewOnlineBehemoth is too big.

By then they'll call it Quantum Behemoths'. 

[Lorizael]

Among other things, the judgment against Microsoft in the Internet Explorer case forced them to open up the Windows APIs to third-party developers, which made it much, much easier for other companies to build and release powerful, competitive browsers on Windows. Again, there's a reason Microsoft's dominance in the browser market didn't come down until after that decision. You think it was just the natural cycle of businesses outcompeting each other, but only because you weren't paying attention; it was state action.

[Elok]

So they weren't making it possible for third parties to develop browsers for their platform.  That, in itself, strikes me as a pretty dumb idea.  In a world where they were not so compelled, would we all be making do with internet explorer until such time as they changed their minds, or made IE better?  Or would the obvious growing importance of the internet lead businesses and private consumers alike to simply use alternative OSes that weren't run by morons forcing us to use bad proprietary software?  We can't know for sure, obviously, but I suspect this would have simply led to the decline of Windows.

EDIT: My point here is that it's not clear that state involvement was necessary to improve the common weal.  I can see no obvious, principled reason why MS was not free to insist on allowing only its own, crappy, sluggish browser to interface with their OS.  I remember Gates's bizarre attitude to the internet, and that one version of Windows where, for reasons unknown, Internet Explorer replaced File Explorer so you used IE to look at your own stuff.  It was his right to have a counterproductive and proprietary attitude towards internet use.  Just as it would have been within, say, Apple's rights to spend a couple of years developing a new, cool OS for non-Macs that embraces a new, fun, collaborative approach to internet use.

[Buster's Uncle]

For that matter, they FORCED me to drop crappy IE, when the time came - they made it stop working at all.  That's playing Monopoly for you.  Force.

[Elok]

Well, you really have me at a disadvantage there, since I didn't even notice when IE disappeared in favor of Edge.  Is this like old versions of Windows, where they just stopped supporting it, or what?  Were you not allowed (say, by an employer) to use a browser that the other browsers didn't make fun of?  My only memory of IE is that everything took twice or three times as long as it did on Firefox, even on the same connection.  Was there a particular reason you wanted to keep using IE?

[Buster's Uncle]

Nerd conservatism.

Really.  I don't like change, and I'm not going to even say screw all browser snobs forever this time.  Suddenly, the only way I could even open it was it was set as the default for clicking on .gif files.  Something must have downloaded w/ a Windows update.  I can't believe there was a good reason to not even LET me wallow in the suck...  Had to just force me.

[Lorizael]

It was his right to have a counterproductive and proprietary attitude towards internet use.

This is the key here. You have a moral opposition to the kind of market interference antitrust policies produce, and you use that moral opposition + shallow research to confirm your suspicions + long, reasonable-sounding paragraphs to backfill your rationalizations for opposing any particular action against monopolistic behavior.

You can have an ideological allegiance to the free market on moral grounds without also needing to believe it is functionally superior in all (or some specific subset of) relevant situations. Requiring that concordance forces you to generate ad hoc rationalizations that you're able to convince yourself are sufficient because you're such a thoughtful, reasonable, moderate guy.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'm tagging out in favor of Lori.

MSEdge didn't hit the ground running gracefully, BTW.

[Elok]

I have come to dislike state interference precisely because, in my experience, it works out poorly.  I'm not married to it or averse to all state participation/interference in the economy, but in this particular case ... okay, can we start by drawing some limits around the concept of monopoly here?  We've called Wal-Mart a monopoly, when it plainly competes against multiple rivals in various subsets of the retail market, and Microsoft a monopoly, when it never really was (Macintosh was always an option) and certainly isn't today.  What makes behavior monopolistic, and what makes monopolies bad?  I can concede that Microsoft's behavior twenty-five years ago hurt consumers by denying us access to decent browsers; it's not clear to me how it actually profited from doing so as opposed to it just being a dysfunctional neurosis or control-freak tendencies.  IE was always bundled in gratis; they were effectively doing extra work to earn no extra money, for ... reasons.  Were there plans to actually make a profit from this later?

EDIT: Also, if you could knock it off with the Bulverism, that would be nice.  I don't try to psychoanalyze your arguments, I just address them.  Or try to, anyway.

[Buster's Uncle]

Both engage in unfair trade practices that suppress competition, leveraging their indisputable dominance in their respective fields into lowering consumer choice.  Yer dictionary misses the entire point.

You worry about the gub'ment wanting to enslave us, and you're not wrong.  It's the innate nature of government.  I worry about the bossmen wanting the same -ever worked for minimum wage?  Been migrant labor?  I have- and want the gub'ment and them to fight - maybe neither will succeed in stomping the little guy while they're distracted and busy.

Bulverism?

[Lorizael]

EDIT: Also, if you could knock it off with the Bulverism, that would be nice.  I don't try to psychoanalyze your arguments, I just address them.  Or try to, anyway.

Your arguments about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior shift each time you learn what the actual facts of the matter are, but your position doesn't. What point is there in addressing each new argument? You'll surely come up with another.

I stopped discussing or even consuming politics online six months ago because it was making me too angry. I thought maybe I had calmed down a bit in the interim. Apparently not. Sure, I'll knock it off.

[Elok]

Bulverism--it's a CS Lewis coinage, but it's an ad hominem variant that responds to arguments by explaining the flaw or bias in your opponent's psychology that you think makes him want to believe the thing he argues, instead of actually addressing the argument.

As for suppressing competition, let's be clear.  Do you mean they are, for example, bribing or otherwise persuading city officials to deny permits to rival grocery stores?  Or intimidating their suppliers into not dealing with them?  Because just leveraging economies of scale is not suppressing competition, it is the act of competition itself.  And also how the consumer gets stuff cheap.  And also their legal obligation to their shareholders; if they're a publicly traded company, they could in theory be sued for being insufficiently cutthroat if it could be argued that it screwed somebody out of stock value.

I have worked minimum wage.  And barely better than minimum wage, for more than half a decade.  The way out was to get skills anybody would actually want to pay better than minimum wage for.  Kinda wish I'd gone into pharmacy much earlier.  But that's on me, not the mismanaged pizza place, the Census Bureau, the gas station, various public school systems, or anybody else.  Of course the flip side of this position is that it should apply to the big people too.  Nobody gets bailed out, nobody gets subsidies.  Sink or swim for the common good.

(This is distinct from the social safety net, which I agree should exist, but is a much more complex question tied up heavily in things like the dysfunction of our healthcare system)