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Re: On No! We Can't Allow Competition!
the most hillarious aspect of all this?
this same crowd (who practically busted a gut over stuff like the patriot act)
fall ALL OVER THEMSELVES gushing on AND ON AND - all over faceboob, about virtually every aspect of every waking moment?
and then wanna piss n moan about VZW and Almost On Line ?
its the same with stuff like 'stem sells' vs nuke power
when the former is messing about with the very essence of life (mostly for vanity) ?
meanwhile... the latter = CARBON-FREE POWER GENERATION = 'danger' ?
never fails to entertain, watching how the 'liberal' dems twist themselves into pretzel shapes to justify their idiotlogical POV on stuff like this... -
Re: On No! We Can't Allow Competition!
I'm no facebook or google cheerleader. I think they do a lot of silly nonsense. And +1 to the Patriot Act bit. People scared that the government has their data are more than happy to let facebook and google know their most intimate thoughts every day. And France seems to do nuclear power just fine. Very successfully. Funded and regulated right, it makes a lot of sense.Originally posted by lektrode View Post
But Verizon and Comcast et al brought this on themselves. They started throttling youtube. They fired the first shots in this war. Then they wanted 'fast lanes and slow lanes' so that only companies that pay a protection racket can stream high quality video. They would have had to have been stone cold dumb to think silicon valley wouldn't fire back. And they did. First you make them look like asses by rolling out Google fiber in a couple of towns and offering speeds an order of magnitude faster. Then you get the FCC involved in stopping the fast lane nonsense - which I, and most people polled, actually agree with - we don't need more rentiers holding out their hands for toll money and jacking up the cost of doing business online. But now they're in there. The war's on.
ISPs can see everything you do right now. I don't see how coordinating with HuffPost and Techcrunch (what else does AOL even do anymore but ads and blogs?) to target advertising makes a big difference. I also don't see it as direct competition to Google or Facebook. I just see it as an ongoing battle of screwing with each other.Comment
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Re: On No! We Can't Allow Competition!
What if they knew silicon valley was going to fire even if they did nothing? Google bid in a spectrum auctions back in 2008 & invested in Clearwire back then too.
If one viewed the shift in newspaper print ad revenues, magazine ad revenues, music sales, etc. & one saw Google hiring game theorists for bidding on competing infrastructure then the intent to compete & risks of it are not farfetched.
Then they roll out offerings like Google Fiber & Project Fi, while testing the Loon balloons and high altitude solar powered drones to deliver internet access, etc. ... eventually one of the "tests" works & then the direct competition is fierce.
There is also the risk of free or virtually free competing services monetized by user tracking & ad targeting. If in-the-ground networks are expensive to maintain & have high fixed costs then if Google can even move a small fraction of subscribers off of them then that can have an outsized impact on margins.
Google has also flip flopped on what they supported. In 2010 they wrote: "under this proposal we would not now apply most of the wireline principles to wireless" they did it to get it passed. Then later it was "These rules should apply regardless of whether you’re accessing the Internet using a cable connection, a wireless service, or any other technology."
Set a standard, make exemptions to get buy in, then get rid of the exemptions which they themselves proposed.
Cross device user tracking allows for both more precise ad targeting and better being able to arbitrage existing brand equity by targeting ads at people who are already more familiar with a brand.I also don't see it as direct competition to Google or Facebook.
Currently the competition between TV ads and Google / YouTube might not seem a heads up battle, but give them another 5 years. And an acquisition of MediaOcean could certainly make some of the competition feel far more direct.
Phones are like mini-spy devices which keep pinging a user's location. Great data source for ad targeting. Sites like Facebook let you upload phone numbers or email addresses for ad targeting & also create look-alike audiences based on that data. Google is considering following Facebook on that front.Comment
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Re: On No! We Can't Allow Competition!
Why American productivity has gone down the drain
Author: Asia Unhedged May 19, 2015
Former Fed Vice-Chairman Alan Blinder writes about the “Mystery of Declining Productivity Growth” at the Wall Street Journal. Growth of output per manhour is the worst since the Great Stagflation of the 1970s.
But why? Maybe it’s a statistical illusion, maybe it’s mean reversion from high productivitygrowth in the past, maybe it’s less rotation of workers through different jobs.
Of course, it could be the fact that capital investment is miserably low compared to past periods. Blinder allows:Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s not just that overall CapEx is down, but that 40% of all CapEx in the S&P 500 has gone to energy, up from 28% in 2007. The U.S. invested disproportionate amounts of its dwindling pool of capital investment to replace imports of oil with domestic shale oil. That’s well and good, but it doesn’t have broader productivity effects like investment in computation and telecommunications.
A third hypothesis, weak investment, is more promising. The basic idea is straightforward: If the capital stock grows more slowly, as it has in recent years, workers will have less new capital to work with, and their productivity will therefore improve more slowly. But when it comes to making that intuitive idea numerical, the time period matters a lot. I’ll spare you the calculations, but the necessary data, which end in 2013, show that weak investment can account for about 70% of the sharp slowdown after 2010. But three years is too short a time period to draw any conclusions. If we date the productivity slowdown from 2005, weak investment accounts for only about 25% of the slowdown.
Here are two less conventional, even counterintuitive, hypotheses.
Maybe, Blinder continues, technological progress “actually slowed in recent years, despite all the whiz-bang stories you read in the business press.” He explains:
Impossible? Well, keep in mind that to an economist “technological progress” means getting more output from the same inputs of capital and labor. Does Twitter do that? Or Snapchat? Some popular online services might even reduce productivity by turning formerly productive work hours into disguised leisure or wasted time.
In somewhat different ways, John Fernald of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, two leading productivity experts, have argued that the greatest productivity gains from information technology came years ago, and that recent inventions look puny by comparison. Compare Facebook with the Internet, or the Apple Watch with the personal computer. Maybe inventiveness has not waned, but the productivity-enhancing impacts of inventions have.
Those are good points, but Asia Unhedged has a simpler view of the matter: America used to have tech companies that produced disruptive technologies. Now it has stable consumer franchises run by patent trolls from the legal department rather than engineers. Our logic is simple: If it walks like Proctor and Gamble, quacks like Proctor and Gamble, and flies like Proctor and Gamble, it’s Proctor and Gamble. The S&P Tech Sub-Sector (the contents of the XLK SPDR ETF) traded with twice the volatility of the S&P 500 index in the late 1990s and early 2000’s, and now it trades with the same volatility of the overall index. In other words, tech isn’t risky anymore. It’s not risky because the patent lawyers have ringfenced their little monopolies, kept new entrants at bay with patent lawsuits, and turned into cash cows.
Of course there’s no productivity growth! There’s less investment, and the companies that used to drive productivity growth now suppress it.Comment
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Re: On No! We Can't Allow Competition!
Professor Jeremy Siegel of Wharton has commented on this over the last few weeks:
"I have repeatedly brought up the startling collapse in productivity growth, bemoaning the fact that it is being ignored by most economists and the Fed. Therefore I was pleased to see Alan Blinder, former vice-chair of the Federal Reserve, weigh in on this phenomenon in today’s WSJ, in an op-ed entitled “The Mystery of Declining Productivity Growth.” He considers my suggestion that GDP statisticians are missing free goods, but rightly asserts that this cannot explain the entire productivity decline. He says that the lack of capex is one explanation but concedes that it also can explain only a part of the productivity decline. Blinder notes, as I have recently, that there have not been any blockbuster technological breakthroughs recently that motivate firm to upgrade information systems. He cites research that claims that businesses are re-allocating labor less actively than they used to, which could signal less entrepreneurial dynamism. He entertains the idea that workers are not working as hard as before, distracting themselves with twitter, Facebook, and other internet diversions. The bottom line is that we really do not know what has caused the productivity slowdown. He hopes, as I do, that the fruits of new technological developments will kick in over the next decade."Comment
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Re: On No! We Can't Allow Competition!
the airlines have adapted to new tech - remember baggage handlers"He hopes, as I do, that the fruits of new technological developments will kick in over the next decade."
and speaking of the fly boys - aren't we glad each and every day for de-regulation - helping to make things more disciplined . . . .
BUSINESS DAY
‘Discipline’ for Airlines, Pain for Fliers
At this week’s meeting in Miami of the International Air Transport Association, the annual meeting of the world’s top airline executives, the buzzword was “discipline.”
Here is Delta Air Lines’ president, Ed Bastian: Delta is “continuing with the discipline that the marketplace is expecting.”
Air Canada’s chief executive, Calin Rovinescu: “People were undisciplined in the past, but they will be more disciplined this time.”
And American Airlines’ chief, Doug Parker, said the airlines had learned their lessons from past price wars. “I think everybody in the industry understands that,” he told Reuters.
Got the message? “Discipline” is classic oligopoly-speak for limiting flights and seats, higher prices and fatter profit margins. This year, that discipline seems to be working: the I.A.T.A. projected this week that airline industry profits would more than double this year to nearly $30 billion, a record.
Having recently paid nearly $1,500 to fly round trip on United from Newark to Indianapolis, on a cramped plane on which I had to hunch over to reach my back-row coach seat and complimentary cup of water, this came as no surprise. What’s good for airlines isn’t necessarily good for consumers, as years of mergers and consolidation are now making clear.
While it’s not illegal on its face to discuss capacity issues at industry conferences, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to interpret this week’s comments as thinly veiled invitations to restrict capacity increases to keep ticket prices high. The industry is already highly concentrated, with only four major carriers accounting for 80 percent of all domestic air travel.
“When airline industry leaders say they’re going to be ‘disciplined,’ they mean they don’t want anyone to expand capacity,” said Fiona Scott Morton, professor of economics at Yale and a former deputy attorney general in the antitrust division of the Justice Department. “And when there aren’t enough seats, airlines raise prices. That’s what we’ve been seeing.”
"(What) they’re all but saying you need to limit output to keep up prices.”
Professor Scott Morton recently co-wrote a study of airline industry competition that concluded the major airlines were stifling competition by restricting the ability of consumers to use the Internet to compare airfares. The study, which was sponsored by the Travel Technology Association, a trade group representing air travel websites, also found minimal price and capacity competition among the major legacy carriers. And she noted that despite a decline in jet fuel prices of 24 percent and a drop in nonfuel operating costs of just under 3 percent in 2014, the average fare per mile increased 0.5 percent during that period.
As anyone who has flown recently on a packed plane should realize, as long as capacity is limited, there’s no incentive for airlines to reduce fares, no matter how low fuel prices or other costs go. The airlines respond that they set prices based on demand.
Last month Southwest’s chief executive, Gary C. Kelly, said the airline, whose image is closely tied to discount fares, was going to expand capacity this year by as much as 8 percent, with the expansion spilling over into 2016. Southwest had already raised capacity this year to 12.1 million available seat miles, from 11.2 billion in 2014, as the airline reported in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week.
But after coming under fire at this week’s conference, Southwest quickly moved to reassure investors it isn’t going rogue. “We have taken steps this week to begin pulling down our second half 2015 to manage our 2015 capacity growth, year-over-year, to approximately 7 percent,” Mr. Kelly said.
Still, comments about capacity growth from Southwest prompt memories, both unwelcome (among investors) and fond (among passengers) about what is still known as the “Southwest Effect”— the phenomenon of sharply lower airfares whenever the maverick upstart Southwest entered a market.
But that era seems long over, and today Southwest is an established industry giant, the largest airline based on domestic passengers boarded. “Today it’s not that much different from the legacy carriers,” Professor Scott Morton said.
As for the American-US Airways merger, “Prices have gone up even as costs have gone down. If there’s a consumer benefit, it’s very subjective, and it would have to be very large to outweigh the harm to consumers from higher airfares.”
So are airfare bargains about to arrive just in time for the summer travel season?
Not if all that talk about “discipline” has an effect.
“I don’t know if we know the answer to that yet,” Mr. Parker of American said in Miami. But unlike previous price wars, this time “feels different.”Comment
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