like I went to taco bell and they didn’t even have napkins out. they had the other stuff just no napkins, I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don’t get napkins! so they can save $100 per quarter rather than provide the barest minimum quality of life features.
We’ve let our companies grow too large, giving them the ability to put the screws on us. Also competition isn’t really happening in many fields, as ask the companies are owned by pretty much the same people.
Why do you think there isn’t more competition? I was wondering if it was too much red tape/legal risk to start up a business. Everyone is saying how greedy these companies are, so they must be charging way more than a fair price, which means an average Joe should be able to step in and provide the same stuff for a fair price.
For a lot of cases the answer is lobbying, e.g. in medical/healthcare there’s practical 0 competition for a lot of products because of anti-competitive laws like really shitty intellectual property laws that let prices be controlled by few (collaborating) companies. Plus there’s a lot of things that are technically illegal, but in practice laws only apply to the poors so they’re not really illegal for corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices#Types
quite a few of them are “natural monopolies”. for those unaware (source):
ie, cable companies, electricity suppliers, amazon. it’s really complicated and really expensive to build the infrastructure needed to meaningfully compete in those industries.
another relevant concept is the “network effect”, defined as (source):
this kind of thing is more applicable to things like social media companies (they’re more appealing the more users they have). this makes it hard to compete with social media companies because convincing people to use your new app is really hard if the usefulness of it depends on everyone’s friends already being on it. (this is also part of the reason twitter is taking so painfully long to die)
both concepts illustrate the different barriers to entry that exist when trying to compete with these giant companies. these barriers are also what allow these huge companies to get so complacent.
(i’m not happy about quoting investopedia or wharton, but they do give simple definitions of both concepts so i did it just this once.)
The Average Joe rarely has enough capital to start a promising enterprise and when they do manage to, they get bought up by the very same corporations they were trying to compete against.
We’ve reached a point where corpos can just buy out the competition and do whatever they please to it.
And it’s not even a greed issue, really. The system is kill or be killed, a corporation that doesn’t do this sort of shady thing won’t make as much money and will be bought out by others that do.
We have to change the rules of the game.
These two things don’t match up. Nobody is forced to sell privately owned companies, they do it because they make several millions by doing it. That’s greed.
Greed? So, wanting to be financially stable for the rest of your life is greed? Never having to worry about money, which is probably the single biggest source of stress in one’s life; that’s being greedy? Meaning that basically every single person is considered greedy. Or is it just that the people who want to, are not greedy, only the people who do, are? Nobody (as in average Joe) is somehow responsible to the “global community” to fight the big companies and their power, fuck that.
I feel like if something like this is considered greed, then the word has lost all of its meaning.
I should’ve perhaps emphasized that I don’t think all greed is equivalent. Perhaps in your internalization of the word, it’s evil.
Nevertheless, selling out to a big company is obviously greedy. You’re most probably fucking your employees a bit for a big paycheck and financial freedom for life. It’s not entirely wrong, you probably deserved it for creating a company and making it succeed. But you still did it because you wanted money more than you wanted to keep running that company.
I’m not against any of this.
I think you will learn that most words are not black-and-white absolutes. Words like “terrorism”, “bigot” and “genocide” are of course a couple of examples that are thrown around rather casually right now.
Warning: I started rambling and this comment is mostly just what I started to think about and perhaps not directly related to your comment. It is filled with rhetoric questions which I just happened to think about and answer them myself.
No, I don’t think that it is evil, but it definitely does have a very negative connotation to it.
Oh I agree very much, it is very rare for something to be black and white, even though nowadays I feel like you’re either for or against something, and this something is actually a conglomeration of many many things all being roped under one topic and you can’t be just for or against part of it, no no, it’s all or nothing. “Us” against “them” mentality is toxic as heck.
Now this is interesting because all this conversation is merely the result of the word greed. As in, what constitutes as greed. But greed is very natural (at least little greed is) and as you put it, it is not black-and-white, there are lots of shades of it. Like you mention that you’d be fucking the employees over for a paycheck, but would you? I mean, it is entirely possible that you are (probably likely), depending on the deal of course (and what the new company has in store for the newly bought company). Very often selling out only really means that the CEO and probably the main folks behind the company are replaced with the big boy company’s own people, but it is very possible that this makes no change for the general employees at all. Though to be fair, it would probably change things at least a little, new people, new systems perhaps, and whatnot (which might not all be inherently negative), but talking in the grand scheme of things.
So is it obvious that it is greedy to do so? Would it require that the employees, to whom you’re responsible of, would be fucked over for it to be greedy? So if nothing changes, then you are no longer greedy? Then again if the new company runs everything down later and blah blah blah then yeah you fucked your employees over but you can’t know that. Or well, you might know, or you might have an idea what might happen, but not necessarily. Could it be a greedy decision in that case? But it seems odd that something to be regarded as greedy depending on how things turn out. At least in my mind it kinda seems odd.
Though thinking about this I guess you could argue that what is actually happening is that you’re receiving money for the possibility of fucking things up for your employees in the future. Because if you just stay, then things stay the same and that’s that. Though of course, selling to a big company is not inherently a negative thing for the company’s employees, it might give lots of financial stability to the company and thereby allowing more stable jobs for your employees. Then you ought to think of the more likely event. If by all accounts it is more likely that your company will go on and your employees are fine or better off, would it then be greedy?
You could also argue that the entire point is to get more money, which you don’t need (assuming of course, it might not be true in all cases though), you just like money (and who doesn’t?) and the security it gives you and all the nice things you get from having more money. And this could be seen as just greed and that’s it.
So hmm I wonder where I stand by this now. Perhaps I don’t think it as necessarily a greedy thing, but it most definitely can be. It all depends on how the transaction is made and what are the motivations behind it, and whether the employees of the company are thought of “enough”. But even if this is the case, there is still something that rubs me the wrong way about this.
And yet, I would 100% do it if given the chance.
My apologies for answers tersely to your wall of text that probably took you awhile to type.
In my definition of the word “greed”, a person who gets $5 an hour and asks for $6 an hour is being greedy. And there’s nothing wrong about that if they deserve it. Also there’s nothing wrong with the newly made millionaire who sold their company that they founded. Like there’s nothing wrong with the CEO of the large company who decided to buy that company. All these three cases have greed as the main motivator, but whether they’re being evil is not about wanting more for yourself. It may become evil by how you implement your greed.
I think we’ve just been taught to distrust this idea in all its manifestations, I would guess through religion. Almost all religions say it’s just a vice and that’s it. No corner cases.
Naw that’s fine, it was mostly just jotting down what I was thinking that day.
That is probably true, and kind of ties to what I said in the beginning that it has a very negative connotation to it. Greed is a very normal thing even though it can be extremely nasty, depending on what kind it is and what it is used on. Which is probably why it is considered a vice in so many places.
Interestingly, I started to think about the person who gets $5/h and asks for a raise to $6/h, you mention that there is nothing wrong with it if they deserve it, but who makes the call? Would it be literally the guy thinking that yo I really deserve that money, or would it be moreso that they ask for it and the employer decides what they deserve (in their mind of course). I guess both of them? They both have a certain view of the employee and the work itself and they put some monetary value to that which they think the employee deserves. Though I guess most of the time the employer does not pay what they think the employee deserves, but as little as possible while still getting employees and the job is done at adequate level. Of course the best case scenario would be that employer pays the employee what they think they deserve and the employee agrees that this is an adequate amount. EDIT: and immediately I started thinking that “best case scenario” for whom? I guess better term would be the most fair scenario. EDIT2: … And you can continue and wonder who gets to decide what is most fair and what is not, but I really really don’t want to start thinking about this any more lmao.
I don’t necessarily think that there would be something wrong about asking for a raise even if you think you don’t deserve it. If you ask for it, and you get it, doesn’t that mean that your employer thinks you do deserve the raise? And if you don’t, then no change happens. Though I guess in this case it would be more “pure” greed? You want something you really know you don’t deserve but just want anyway and ask for it. Would that be wrong? I don’t know actually.
Oh well, I’m not gonna start to ramble off too much this time but as a concept, greed and everything relating to it and where one might draw the line is pretty interesting.
Competition goes way down when all the different companies are owned by a very small set of huge companies. And for these companies it’s easy to setup cartels and just simply not compete and jack up the prices. Competition happens when the companies must make a profit or die, not when conglomerates can trust that they’re the only game in town.
Lately I’ve been wondering if it would be a good idea to outlaw international and interstate corporations
If Disney was limited to only a single state, would they have been able to affect copyright policy to the extent that they did?