Tanista
2d ago
Unfortunately, the last two factors only work if the state is significantly stronger than the corporate entities, and willing to regulate them. When social media companies become big enough to sway public opinion though, they get the power to significantly reduce the will of the population, whilst lobbying for politicians to deregulate.
Chinese social media sites already tried this to stop the sale of TikTok. That's my real problem here: this doesn't prevent this happening, it just prevents you from having your own companies (which do respond to US government pressure, e.g. with the pressure over "misinformation" or the Hunter Biden story).
So only jobs are left. This is important of course, but I would argue that mega corps are not necessary for this. After all, several countries exist without mega corps and still manage to have low unemployment.
The countries that don't have megacorps are basically buying their services from the US. The EU doesn't have its own social media sites and the solution is to just take US ones and regulate them. Of course, this only works if the US doesn't respond badly (which it is now). All of this seems strictly inferior to just building your own.
There's also the fact that these more regulations focused states are simply not doing as well as the US and arguably leech in some fields like pharma where the US spends more. I don't think wanting to control social media companies caused this, but maybe the mindset may apply elsewhere and be damaging.
I've always found it an irrelevant point. At one point you could also say that the US didn't want to get involved in the world domination business and wanted to just make money and control its near abroad.
Tanista
3d ago
I am essentially asking for policies that would prevent individuals and companies from getting this big in the first place, and to break up the existing monopolies into smaller, competing groups.
Is China going to reciprocate?
I don't think that we can assume that American champions are just going to continue to be massively successful without the economies of scale or that even less accountable foreign companies won't take over. This, I assume, is Nybbler's complaint about wanting upsides with no downsides.
What do they actually want?
Marxism, or the leveling they expect it to provide.
It's just the labour theory of value conveniently cut off at such a point that it doesn't apply to anyone they know (or could conceivably be) or their favorite allied rich people (culture-producing left-wing celebrities and athletes ), though even some of those will breach the generous cap.
Halo does NOT depict a racial struggle at all, it is portrays a religious struggle.
Yes, you might as well say that Stargate is fascist and about racial struggle.
In fact, both stories aren't really a religious struggle but a struggle of science against blind superstition and plain lies. The stories don't really grant respect to the opposing side as theories or moral systems.
The Covenant are just provably wrong because they've sacralized what are scientific instruments and their credulity has led them to not only kill their own gods but get used as tools by the Prophets (who know some of the doctrine is false but refuse to collapse the business model).
The Jaffa/servants of all of the Goa'uld in Stargate are also just wrong (and terrorized into submission): their gods are not only technologically advanced aliens masquerading as such, they're not even the original inventors of their technology! The actual inventors are, while effete, durably in the scientist-humanist camp.
(Stargate did have to wrestle with the inevitable power creep taking them to a place where their enemies could make a good case for being gods and their religion was at least somewhat efficacious though)
It's not a problem unless you're the SOB born at the exact wrong time to benefit from either family support or welfare (or AI)
The country/ethnic group will survive but it's not gonna be fun for you personally. Which is a major incentive, in people's eyes, to not fight immigration or the dominant pro-immigration parties.
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