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civilrunner t1_ivcon7g wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Becoming increasingly pessimistic about LEV + curing aging by Phoenix5869

That's a taxation problem. They keep prices lower and provide substantial competition across countless industries including web services.

Their pay for workers is also pretty high and they offer to pay off tuition and more. I know it's fun and popular to hate them, but I personally blame the politicians who write the tax code.

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[deleted] t1_ivcpzg9 wrote

Monopolies crush competition, they don’t create it. Amazon buys out its competition it doesn’t bother trying to better them. It is probably the worst example for “encouraging competition” you could pick in our global economy.

And you’re now deviating significantly from your initial statement about protecting democracy when you advocate that a company employing millions should be run by 1 unelected dictatorial owner.

Which one is it? Democracy or dictatorship?

You can’t advocate both; these push us in opposite directions.

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civilrunner t1_ivcqeja wrote

Amazon is a lot of things, but a monopoly is definitely not one of them. Walmart still controls more market share for retail than Amazon does by a pretty wide margin. Even AWS has healthy competition with Microsoft and others and is therefore not a monopoly...

Amazon is a public company in the private industry. They aren't part of the government obviously... The government taking over them would also be devastating to our economy. Private Public partnerships and taxation with reinvestment is the way to go...

I get that you like to doom, but at least know what to doom about. Moore v Harper, the SCOTUS case that may allow state legislators to ignore voters and send electors as they please and therefore end democracy is the biggest threat today.

We should elect officials who may enable reducing inequality and creating opportunity through government investments but that's a separate issue...

Edit: also you can always buy Amazon shares and then vote about the direction of their company if you'd like...

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[deleted] t1_ivcr2wo wrote

Hard to swallow fact: a country cannot claim to be very democratic at all when millions of its people are made to spend the largest share of their waking hours languishing under a dictatorial power structure. That’s absolutely how 99% of hierarchical capitalist businesses are structured.

So you don’t in fact advocate for democracy, you need to admit you have no problem with authoritarianism dominating the majority of peoples lives.

That’s a direct threat to the sort of socialised life extension I think most people assume is desirable

I would expect that people with an interest in the singularity should all expect us to move on from barbarism’s like this. You can start by advocating for democracy to be expanded into all walks of life; I’ve little doubt a singularity would lead to workplaces returning to common ownership as worker coops or similar; if for no other reason than that it will recognise that all human history has represented the struggle to free ourselves from authoritarian oppressors

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