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[Angle]

If it wasn't for the fact that no one cares about the opinions of someone who can't vote, I'd be shooting emails to this guy left and right.

You know you don't have to tell them that, right? Just send them an email saying "I think that <Whatever>".

[SalmonGod]

Sometimes monopolies make sense.  Sometimes it isn't practical for a whole bunch of smaller groups to compete at providing a solution to a problem.  Like I don't understand why Google needs competitors.  I think it's great that they have such a large amount of resources at their disposal to put towards solving really complex problems with infrastructure that a smaller company wouldn't be able to assemble, and that they are able to provide such a wide variety of services and products that integrate in powerful ways.  They wouldn't be able to do these things if they were a smaller company competing against a lot of other smaller companies.  Nobody would.  I also don't see why we need a bunch of cable/phone/internet providers competing against each other, each providing a lesser service than what would be possible if they could all combine their infrastructures   The problem isn't always monopolies.  Sometimes it's just the way capitalism encourages monopolies to behave.

[Truean]

http://news.yahoo.com/popeyes-backtracks-firing-pregnant-manager-robbed-gunpoint-231236175.html

Damn straight.

Unconfirmed reports (difficulty authenticating documents is to be expected) stating sales have plummeted amid boycotts have come in. We are upset and tired of our lives being valued so little as $400. We are sick and tired of actual people having to work themselves to death for absolutely no company loyalty or appreciation to the point where they expect you to die in an armed robbery to protect every penny for the company and be damned grateful about it.

Moreover, this had to have been motivated by stupid completely irrational things, because money could not or at least should not have been a part of it. Why? Simple, the bad press from this alone has to have cost them far more than a mere $400, never mind the boycotts. They could have known that, but chose not to. This was an absolutely bone headed move on the part of the company contrary to the idea that they would act in their own self interest. Frankly, this is yet another end result to the "why should we pay for _____?" insanity that is all too prevalent today. Honestly, it's true on many levels. First, the $400 itself should've been written off. Second, a policy manager or lawyer or somebody should have looked over this train wreck of a company policy and realized it was insane and that person should have been supported. Instead, the "we're in charge and invincible" attitude clearly took hold. Third, the company could have bought insurance for this, but didn't seem to have done so. Fourth, I've seen people get fired for trying to stop a robbery at the story they were working for, but this lady doesn't do that and still gets fired? It's just a problem all around.

People are sick of the idea that there is literally NO limit on what you can be told to do. Sadly, they still won't do jack about it most of the time, but at least here something happened about it.

[Frumple]

... I like how they're apparently offering just back pay as a peace offering. Not, y'know, any sort of monetary recompense for the stress or treatment or whatev'. Just money they would have paid th'person anyway, had they not fired 'em. You can't pay for absurdity like that. That's quite possibly the least effort above absolute nil I've ever seen put towards soothing feathers.

[Angle]

...Wait, isn't that illegal? Firing somebody and not paying them for time that they worked?

[Frumple]

Presumably it's how much they would have paid the person if they had been working, during the period between when the business fired 'em and now. Not actually money the company had previously owed. Hopefully.

[alway]

Even tossing out any human decency and thousands of years of philosophy, that doesn't even make sense from a soulless, manipulative corporation hell-bent on nothing above profits. All else aside, this sort of behavior would almost certainly put their liability insurance costs through the roof. Not content with just heinously immoral, it's downright stupid to boot.

[UXLZ]

That's one of the things that often pisses me off about companies like this the most. Not only do they do terrible things focusing on profit above all else, they do it WRONG!

[Angle]

That's one of the things that often pisses me off about companies like this the most. Not only do they do terrible things focusing on profit above all else, they do it WRONG!

QFT

[Helgoland]

The problem isn't always monopolies.  Sometimes it's just the way capitalism encourages monopolies to behave.

A thousand times this. Look up the erm 'natural monopoly', SG - it's the concept you describe.
Occasionally monopolies are indeed more efficient than competitive markets. We need to recognize the fields in which that is so and allow monopolies to form there - but only under fairly strict supervision of the monopoly hat forms. I'd like to see Google and Facebook as become semi-public institutions - private enough to facilitate their productive work, but public enough to keep them from abusing their power.

Ah, yes, I agree too. So does anyone have any alternative ideas? For myself, I'd like some kind of distributed system, with lots of little organizations that compete and cooperate, and where no organization is allowed to gain too much power. You would need a fairly strict set of rules, and you would need people to put in the time & effort to enforce them but I think it could work quite well.

What about capital-intensive fields, such as the automotive industry, power generation (come on, decentralized power generation is a pipe dream) and transfer, or shipbuilding? We used to not have big enterprises at all - look into the history of the industrial revolution to see why they were formed.

[UXLZ]

In theory a single organization having absolute authority and power is the most ideal and efficient way of running things.

Emphasis on the in theory. Humans are too easily corruptible, and machines break.

[Helgoland]

In theory a single organization having absolute authority and power is the most ideal and efficient way of running things.

Emphasis on the in theory. Humans are too easily corruptible, and machines break.

Not even in theory - the overhead for the necessary information collection apparatus* would be too big.

*Which usually is replaced by the forces of the (free, more or less) market, which are less accurate but much cheaper.

[hops]

The only reason capitalism could sustainably work imo is if the system is occasionally fought. Of course, a system that requires itself to be damaged in order to function isn't a very good system.

[Helgoland]

Our immune system is a bad system?

[Reelya]

A thousand times this. Look up the erm 'natural monopoly', SG - it's the concept you describe.

Spoiler: Roads are a good example. (click to show/hide)

(1) Trying to extract "user-pays" out of every section of road just sounds like a nightmare and a huge barrier to everyone else doing normal business. Commerce works best when people have low barriers to trade, and if we're hitting everyone to use the roads on a per-use basis, that's a huge overhead and big disincentive to start-ups. Having different owners for each section of road would be required to create a competitive market. But artificial disparities in costs will cause people to take sub-optimal routes to avoid tolls (this already happens). Sub-optimal routes means fuel prices going up, and more wear and tear on vehicles means higher prices for auto repairs. Plus extra carbon and toxin emissions, which hurts everyone.

(2) road competition sounds like a waste of space. Say that there's a highway to the next town. If the whole highway is owned by one company, then that's a monopoly, and means you only need to pay once to use that road. Highway usage will drop, definitely, compared to now where you can drive down it for "free". That highway is thus a monopoly then since you don't have an equivalent alternative. Should someone build a second parallel highway and compete with the first? Now you've wasted space, and every business along the highway needs to decide whether to be along highway #1 or highway #2, so you have twice as many ancillary business' too, but they each get less than half the clients as now, meaning per-client costs need to rise, and you have two highways worth of maintenance, plus you have to have enough police to keep each new road safe. Who should pay for those police?

Generally natural monopolies can be identified pretty objectively. They tend to have high fixed costs vs marginal costs, and to have high set-up costs compared to operational costs. Also, they tend to have high set-up and fixed costs compared to the size of the market. In these cases, adding a rival company increases the total costs to serve all customers higher than it was before.

For example, building a nuclear reactor in a region likely falls as a natural monopoly, since most of the costs are in the set-up, and operational / marginal costs are relatively low. Whereas operating an airline isn't a natural monopoly, since the costs are pretty linear per-plane rather than per-company, and operational costs make up a lot of the cost.