It don't mean to diminish Warhammer's success, but part of the reason why it's one of the "biggest companies" is because many of the other big companies have slowly disappeared. Britain used to have a viable ship building industry that employed huge amounts of people. It's gone. It can't compete. And the same story is repeated again and again. Companies like Morris Garage and Triumph used to compete on the world stage. No longer.
Again, I'm proud of the Warhammer folks. It's just the fact that it's one of the "biggest" makes me sad.
Nothing gets rid of capitalism. In the socialist world, various forms of status just replace basic currency. When goods are limited, there has to be some way to ration them. In the former Soviet Union, it was just high party officials who were rich in limited goods. Maybe they didn't have "money" or US-style "capital", but they had other things that took that role.
There's a thing called "copyright" and it's kind of like a union, but for people who write or create art. It gives them the right to decide who gets to make a copy. Many of the best sources of news put up a paywall because it's what allows them to pay their reporters. When you make an illicit copy without their permission, you undermine their ability to make a living. In other words, eat.
I'm not interested in having a debate on the legality of it which is why I said "legally questionable." It doesn't strike me as implausible that you wouldn't know what copyright is, if you don't accept the premise that linking to the internet archive for any and all paywalled contemporary content is at least legally questionable.
> if you don't accept the premise that ... is at least legally questionable.
The premise was that this is so obvious that my naivety is funny. But no, you don't want to debate that point - Why would you care to consider otherwise, it's not you losing face if correct.
You'll also notice that the link in this post (https://archive.is/TajtJ) shows a 'log in' button, implying that log-in credentials where not used (or abused) to get/share this snapshot.
I don’t follow the first paragraph of this comment at all, it just seems vaguely antagonistic. You also seem to be suggesting I’m taking a view on a debate that I am not.
That such a blog post exists at least suggests the legal “question” exists, which again is the only thing I said in the first place.
What is this concentrated power you speak about? In many areas, they have exactly the same power as everyone else. They get only one vote each election day. They have to queue up at the Post Office, grocery store, etc just like everyone else.
Now you're right that they have more money and they can spend it. Some things like hiring a lawyer to sue someone are too expensive for an average person but accessible to billionaires. Rich people can do things with taxes loopholes that aren't practical for the average schmoe.
It is true that they often have power at their company and sometimes they use it overtly or covertly. But even this can be limited because they have to work with partners and other shareholders. The CEO of a big publicly traded company can't just break the rules because they're on a power trip.
> They have to queue up at the Post Office, grocery store, etc just like everyone else
Don't be obtuse. The people we're talking about don't go to the Post office, or the grocery store, and they certainly don't queue up. They don't even queue up at the airport, they have private planes, private security, private everything.
And "they only get one vote each election day". Voting is the least amount of political influence that a person can have.
Actually, you're the one being obtuse. The point isn't that they use Instacart to avoid the lines. The point is that everyone can use Instacart or the USPS mobile app and everyone pretty much pays the same price. The point is that there's no special level of power that's available only to people with a billion dollars.
There's this mythology built around great wealth and it's largely false. They can't just snap their fingers and make things happen as if by magic. There's no special magic power that only they get. They have to pay for what they want and just like normal humans, they can only spend the money once.
I don't know how you can't see it, but people who have gobs of wealth absolutely have more options (and more powerful options) than people who don't. For just one small example, they can purchase equity in non-public companies. If a regular person wanted to invest in OpenAI, they couldn't. But if a billionaire wants to throw down $10b, they can.
Just like how someone who has $200k can get a mortgage to buy a house, whereas someone with only $20k cannot. That's economic power that comes from having wealth to leverage.
Sensationalist garbage. Actual studies have found that the loss in revenue is minimal, and that current wealth taxes are well below what they should be for maximum benefit:
> We show that trickle-down effects do exist, but that they are quantitatively small. A one percentage point increase in the top wealth tax rate decreases aggregate employment by 0.02%, aggregate investment by 0.07%, and aggregate value-added by 0.10% in the long run. Importantly, these effects are modest despite the fact that top wealth holders—many of whom are entrepreneurs—account for a large share of economic activity in Scandinavia through the businesses they control. Our approach to estimating trickle-down effects is arguably the most innovative part of our paper. It is based on clear identification assumptions and is statistically precise.
> The modest economic effects of tax-induced migration do not necessarily imply that wealth taxation is an optimal policy. To evaluate wealth taxation, we also have to account for their effects along the intensive margin, operating through changes in savings, investments, avoidance, and evasion. Jakobsen, Jakobsen, Kleven and Zucman (2020) find sizable intensive margin effects of wealth tax reform in Denmark. Combining the migration estimates presented here with their intensive margin estimates, we show that the Scandinavian wealth taxes were below the Laffer point and that their Marginal Cost of Public Funds (MCPF) was about 4.2.54 Leaving aside equity arguments, taxing top wealth would be welfare-improving if the revenue raised is spent on projects with a Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) greater than 4.2. Comparing MVPFs across a range of policies, Hendren and Sprung-Keyser (2020) argue that programs targeted to low-income children have the highest MVPFs, often greater than 5. This suggests that funding projects for low-income children via progressive wealth taxation has the potential to increase social welfare.
When academia has purged most Republicans, science can no longer be done. The point is to disprove hypotheses, nowadays academics ignore science and just twist data to show what they want.
Republicans scream at scientists and try to get them fired for doing climate science research, destroy funding bodies, pass legislation saying what professors can and cannot teach in class, and generally call the entire academic ecosystem a bunch of groomers. Fewer republicans choose to go to graduate school and become professors. This, somehow, means that research can never be done, justifying further destruction of academia.
I'm very sorry but I don't understand how not having a dozen race science people teaching about brain pans down the hall means my research is bunk.
Pretty, yes, but geopolitical issues slow the service. We were at least two hours late thanks to various issues with crossing the border and fitting in with the cargo trains.
I don't think the lack of talent is preventing us from having good public transportation. Diverting smart folks from yacht building will not eliminate the problems with unions, zoning, or crime to name a few of the issues. These are difficult problems because people and their different desires are involved.
One city has a millionaire who builds a yacht for 100M dollars in a local shipyard and uses it for holidays. The neighbor city has a millionaire who spends 100M dollars to build 10 ferries he gifts to the city.
The general population is clearly better off in the second case, even if it does not matter for the workers in the shipyard.
Cute gambit to talk about ferries, the one mode of transport that doesn't have insane land-use debates. (Although they do need waterfront property on both ends.) I'll give you a point for that one.
But let's be serious. Ferries have a very limited use in only a few cities. Even then, the appeal is limited because they're relatively slow.
I submit that the most common result of replacing one yacht with $100m of public transit spending is that the unions and the bureaucracy will eat up the $100m in a few minutes.
The theory here is that diverting more smart people into "good" careers like urban planning will be great. But if we look at the last 100 years in the United States, the rise of careers like urban planning have been correlated with an explosion in construction costs.
Yet back in the bad old days when there weren't urban planning degrees and only a few effete twits went to college, private capitalism was able to build two big urban transit systems in NYC. No book smart people. Just sandhogs and profit motive. How much did it cost to add just a few stops to the NYC subway over the last two decades?
Yes, when you don't care about the environment or safety regulations or displacing people poorer than you, infrastructure is a very easy problem to solve. Fortunately for you, we seem to be heading back towards that way of thinking.
Also, I live near a city that had one of those ridiculous, way over budget projects where sure, some money was funneled to unions and bureaucracy or whatever evil monsters you've concocted here. No amount of billionaire pet projects could match the amount of good it did across the number of people it affected. Sometimes the inefficiencies of human cooperation are greased with money, and that's perfectly fine.
That seems very lucky of the second city. Let's hope we get lucky with some generous billionaires soon!
I don't claim that regulations are simple, and incentives couldn't be created to result in infrastructure investment by the wealthy... but I won't hold my breath.
Again, I'm proud of the Warhammer folks. It's just the fact that it's one of the "biggest" makes me sad.
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