You’re right about these very real issues and that they’re the primary driver but I think you’re wrong about considering armed annexation to be unrealistic. I think all of us are on a gut feel about it at this point and some of us have shifted our assessment from being a distraction to a real even if not very likely possibility.

If we look at other companies that have been in Apple’s position, this seems to be a temporary state of affairs even if it lasts for a while. If the expectation is for profit to grow year over year (it is), as growth of market share stalls because you’ve already expanded as much as you could, you’d get pressed to find profits by exploiting existing revenue streams. That’s the point when employee opposition stops working. Think of the recent events when the Google Search VP opposed the Ad VP’s requests to make search worse in order to improve ads revenue. The Ad VP got appointed to lead search and the previous search VP got moved to a dark corner somewhere. Once you run out of profit growth in the existing revenue streams, they’d ask you to find profit growth by reducing labor cost. We also saw that happening in various companies over the last little while.

If Apple was a private corporation owned by some people who aren’t looking for ever increasing profits, I’d believe they might not follow this pattern. But they aren’t.

That’s just my guess and the reasons behind it. Could turn out that you’re right and Apple is an exception to the rule. I mean, I hope it does but I’m not optimistic.

Any replacement is subject to the priorities of Apple’s major shareholders and its board. Those push for further monetization of Apple products and services.

WTF, I always thought Dr. Oetker was just another brand of some American multinational. It’s apparently German.

Or drink non-decaf and be up at 2AM. 😆

It might be time for the Taiwanese people to take a page from their Chinese comrades and learn that they can’t rely on a private corporation to do what’s in their and their country’s best interest. If they want to keep that democracy, they better reign in their capitalists before they sell the country’s security for profit.

I think you are underestimating the effect. I’ve learned a whole lot in my year and a half here. Enough to develop a decent understanding of what’s going on and what concrete actions I could take in my corner of the world. I think we can’t expect action without understanding of why act and what action. I think discussions here help with that. For all the people who post and comment, there are many who read, learn go find out more, and so on. Some of those would take action that they wouldn’t have otherwise. If we don’t platform that do this, if all there is are corporate platforms that keep people unaware of even the basics of what’s happening beyond the reporting, then the number of people who’d act in some productive way would be even lower.

Old Social Media

Oof, heavy shade. Well done! Makes the Fediverse sound cooler.

How does an oligarchy come into existence in a capitalist democracy that didn’t start with a monarchy? Can you see a relationship between the process of consolidation and the creation of this oligarchy, where the oligarchs are the people who accumulated wealth through this process, gradually using this wealth to capture the regulators, leading to more consolidation, more wealth and greater capture, and repeat? We didn’t wake up one day with an oligarchy that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s not like all of the current oligarchs can be traced back to an oligarchic family from the past.

I’m not familiar with the corporate landscape in Germany, but the US and Canada also have anti-trust law and competition agencies whose purpose is to prevent consolidation. Why hasn’t that prevented it?

He’s coming for your couch. Tape the seams.

Businesses need to fail because otherwise the wrong people end up leading.

When businesses fail, their competitors buy their assets, employees, customer bases, and get bigger. Keep playing that a few more rounds and you get a monopoly that can and will prevent or buy new entrants. Then anyone including the wrong people in the industry enter this one company because that’s the only company in this industry.

This isn’t an argument against letting businesses fail. It’s an argument to show that the game of competition doesn’t produce stable competitive environment in the long run. Instead it’s a temporary stage that some markets exist in on the way to consolidation. You can find countless examples for this around us. And therefore letting businesses fail through competition isn’t a long term solution to these problems.

That’s the sad part. They only get the first half right. 😂

It’s not journalism. It’s entertainment.

“We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully much more productive,” Trump said.

🫨

Guess what, it’s the politicians job to get the horse’s head into the water. If they fail to do that they were either incompetent or didn’t work hard enough. You should go find Chuck Schumer’s words from the mid 2010s where he says he doesn’t mind losing blue collar votes.

The long term downsides won’t affect them much.

Since the project is already okay with Github, perhaps a set of polls in Github with this feature, linked far and wide in Lemmy.

0.5% in January alone