I don't follow: in a scenario where the Treasury sells at a loss and ends up owning 100% of the equity, you have real control and nationalisation, right? A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
Buying up a ShitPile™ isn't the same, because it's a disorganised mess of claims and counterclaims, and not a strategy for the entire indutry.
True nationalisation would mean ownership and strategic management, with the explicit goal of running the finance industry for the benefit of Main St, not Wall St.
The Dodd plan has some elements of that, but it falls short of going all the way.
Except that that's not how they were run, even in the Soviet Union in the 1960's, if Galbraith is to be believed. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
I don't think there's an organic need in complex planning systems. The problem is setting aims - jobs, quality of service, profits, pick any two - and getting a balance between dynamism and stability.
Monolithic state enterprises vs predatory freebooting capitalists aren't the only two possible options.
To paraphrase Gilmore
"The Internet interprets rentiers as damage and routes around them"
Apparatchiks probably are Damage, too. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
And neither of them appear to have been the dominant forms in the 1960's, again if Galbraith is to be believed. I wasn't alive to see it, were you? A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
The "dynamism of markets" narrative simply doesn't apply. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
I agree that there's no such thing as inherent market dynamism. But I don't see that as the issue.
It's really about management culture. The problem with nationalised industries is that they're managed by ignorant civil servants and equally ignorant time-serving pols, who are parachuted into departments where they're supposed to offer expert direction even though they have no fucking clue.
The problem with piratical freebooting industries is that they're run by vampires and psychopaths.
Somewhere between those extremes are lean cultures which move fast and actually work well.
There's nothing inherently economic about this - it's almost entirely a management problem.
By the mid 70s that effort had largely run of steam - certainly in the UK, and probably also in the US. I don't know enough about Soviet Rrrrussia to say anything plausible about what was happening there, but the Soviets didn't seem to have a similar innovation culture, and never really got over their pseudo-Lysenkoist ambivalence about science.
By the 80s a lot of these middle ground enterprises were dead, dying, or on life support, which suggests they can't really have been all that responsive.
HP used to be very good but nowadays its more their tech support than anything else thats of great quality. Tech companies in general are no better than their nuts and bolts counterparts in having new ideas. google just has so much money nowadays it can afford a scattershot development approach, either that or buy up anything that looks like its a got a good chance of being successful. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
But not.
I'm really starting to dislike Apple. If you take away the maDz Dezignz Skillz there's a fascist jackboot behind that funky Gap-wearing facade.
Apart from the shiny, they're good at building closed consumer markets which they can dominate ruthlessly, in the same way that Microsoft tries to build and dominate business markets.
Jobs was smart enough to realise that hardware and software are drug pusher techno-teasers now, and you make your money from building a content bazaar and renting out space in it.
All I know is that while the addicts are still enslaved by the shiny, it's getting harder and harder to find Apple journos, many of whom used to be fans, who actually like Apple any more.
Wouldn't it be a huge surprise if there were good reasons for that?
But it's always good when a company doesn't kill viable products just because it can.
In some cases the phone bricks itself on the spot.
Then the police have to be called in to some locations because there's serious danger of rioting.
Purely dispassionately - really, does anything about this seem sane to you?
Yep - buy Apple, and you'll be special. But not.
Reminds me of a mate and I seeing the Levellers in Wolverhampton, and literally crying with laughter at the crowd all chanting in unison "Theres only one way of life and thats your own" Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
is it so ruthless, when people are contributing apps from all over that work on apple's OS?
apple just makes IT easier for luddites and non-nerds to enjoy worry free computing, the whole 'think different' was good pr, but only could take on a rebel, 'creative' aspect because MS was ruthlessly locking people into bloatware that didn't work very reliably.
as apple got bigger, quality went down in some areas, but unless you're into linux, apple still represents a middle way, happy medium between gateswarez and the future, which undoubtedly will go to open source, peer to peer, drm free eventually. power to the people!
it's an interim thing...
(and yes the mac superiority complex is as ugly as any other!)
once you work with a mac, it's hard to go back, but one day i want to go beyond, to the starry firmament where the really free spirits live and code... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Just to contribute a bit more to the total OT-ness of this subthread:
Have you looked at Ubuntu? The Momcat has been trying off and on for years to kick the M$ habit. She has had a spin or two with several different Linux distributions, but even with live-in tech support (me) she never really got completely comfortable. Like a smoker breaking down, she would always eventually go back to the borg. About two years ago she tried Ubuntu and immediately fell in love. She shows every sign of being quite happy with it. She has gone through at least one complete upgrade with essentially no help from me. She still keeps an old W98 installation for the odd anime DVD that won't play nice, but she rarely uses it anymore. Now where are we going and what's with the handbasket?
No largemature corporation is fleet-footed. It's a planning organization
I wasn't alive to see it, were you?
I turned 21 in '63. The economy was dominated by a large number of large corporations, in every industry. Banking and finance was a rather small area. The sort of industrial policy to which Gailbraith refers required consensus amongst a wide number of participants. That is much less so today. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
