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Depends on how you look at it. As a consumer you get lots of benefits from them throwing around huge amounts of money and selling things below cost (or giving
by UncleEntity 4y ago
Depends on how you look at it.
As a consumer you get lots of benefits from them throwing around huge amounts of money and selling things below cost (or giving away for free) because they have the theory that a losing bet is better than economic fundamentals leading to a profitable venture. Just keep throwing money in the pot until it either goes big or goes broke — or, I suppose, gets bought and they can cash out where it becomes somebody else’s problem.
Of course this isn’t so good if you’re in one of the “disrupted” industries where this is clearly predatory behavior (intentionally losing money to drive all the competition out of the market) to corner the market.
But people don’t care because they get their subsidized goods/services and all these displaced workers can just “learn to code”.
- stephc_int13 4y agoOn the contrary, I think that innovative disruption is good. Competition is good. But monopolies are bad, on all levels. The incentives are overall very short-term. With a few exceptions.
- UncleEntity 4y agoSure, innovation and competition are good. Monopolies aren’t even inherently bad as long as they achieved it naturally and don’t abuse their monopoly position. What is bad is predatory tactics like running at a loss because you know it will put the competition out of business then raising prices to their true cost like Uber does. Ironically they still can’t make a profit without abusing their “employees” for whatever reason, probably because the margins are so low in that industry it can’t support multiple multi-billion dollar mega-corporations.