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A good argument is the question what happens with the money. For example, assume Facebook replaces a local competitor. Now instead of the profit going to owner
by kuschku 9y ago
A good argument is the question what happens with the money.
For example, assume Facebook replaces a local competitor. Now instead of the profit going to owners, which spend it locally, on philanthropic projects, or just high quality goods, instead it goes to Mark Zuckerberg, who spends it in the US, on US brands, and to fund US charities, in best case.
If you currently live outside the US, outside SV and NYC, you’d very likely gain an advantage if everyone would buy local. The skyscrapers of NYC, and the philanthropic projects in these regions of the US, are funded with money that was extracted all over the globe, but will probably never leave the US again.
- mseebach 9y agoYou need to see a layer deeper than that. The opportunity cost of the tens of thousands of highly qualifies engineers required to build and run dozens of national/regional Facebooks rather than doing something else is absolutely huge.
- icebraining 9y agoFree software can help with that. In my past two jobs, I've worked with a business platform which we adapt for our clients by developing custom modules, and there's a decent community of small companies from over the world which sell mostly to their internal markets but share modules under Free licenses. Of course, nobody is getting rich from this, but there are many of us making a very decent living.
- mseebach 9y agoIt's not about that. It's about choosing not to use an existing, appropriate solution because it is not being developed and run locally. There can be valid regulatory or security reasons to choose that, I'm only considering the "keeping money local" argument.
- icebraining 9y agoMy point is that you can keep money local without having to develop everything locally.