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I'm glad the US has environmental and safety standards and enforces those (to some degree) on imports. Those actually accomplish some good and have positive externalities.
It's also worth noting that other countries have significant non tariff barriers as well, perhaps more significant than the US, and ones with less positive effects. Some Chinese examples are the Great Firewall (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/business/international/ch...) and fact that a large part of the Chinese economy is still state-owned (and could be politically directed to avoid importing American products without any need for a tariff).
Not really, we call them workaholics (e.g. work-addicts) if they're so compelled to work that they can establish boundaries between it and the rest of their lives.
No, it actually is that difficult, or more precisely that undesirable. Very few people are such anti-Facebook activists that they're going to dump valued friends and acquaintances in order to dump Facebook. That's why Facebook is going to hold on to a lot of users, and why it'll end in a whimper and not a bang.
The only case where it "really isn't that difficult" is if you have no valued relationships that have a Facebook component.
But that's usually always true: 90s era Windows users had alternatives in the Macintosh and Sun workstations, and Monopoly-era AT&T users had alternatives in CB radios, etc.
That explainer you linked even uses language that excludes some competitor products: "Microsoft was found to have a monopoly over operating systems software for IBM-compatible personal computers" [emphasis mine].
That is a fair statement, but as far as the FTC is concerned that's probably not enough....
> By the reasoning of your stament [sic], all that's needed to establish a 100% monopoly is a sufficiently narrow definition of market.
I don't think the reasoning in my statement is sufficient to identify a monopoly, and it wasn't indented to be such. What I was trying to communicate is that you can't disprove a monopoly based on comparing marketshare numbers, and the actual determination is probably rather complicated and requires a lot of expert judgement.
I think Apple's business practices warrant careful and continuous antitrust scrutiny. If they're a monopoly, the form that takes will probably be significantly different than the one taken by 90s-era Microsoft.
> Microsoft had something like a 97% marketshare. Apple is nowhere near that.
Whether a company is a monopoly or not seems to depend a lot how the market in question is defined, for instance:
Apple has a 100% marketshare in the distribution of iOS apps. Monopoly-era AT&T had far less than a 100% marketshare in electricity-powered devices.
When you're in business as long as DEC was, I think that inevitable if you want the product numbers to be short and memorable.
As odd as it sounds, my understanding is that China's Han population doesn't all speak the same language, but they (for the most part) read/write the same language. They call the variations in spoken language "dialects," but many of them are mutually unintelligible. I think the situation is the similar to a hypothetical one where the Romance countries (e.g. France, Spain, Italy, etc.) speak their respective modern languages, but continue to write exclusively in Latin.
Just a small unimportant quibble that doesn't negate your larger point.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/soul-of-a-new-machine-tracy...
It's mostly about the development of the Data General Nova computer. It's mostly about (80s) hardware engineering, but there's some software stuff too, IIRC.
"Discrimination" is a neutral term though: there are acceptable kinds and unacceptable kinds. For instance, it is discrimination to not let a stranger sleep in your home or in your bed, though no one reasonable would call that unacceptable discrimination.
The actual policy we're talking about here is a country-neutral permanent immigration quota coupled with country-neutral per-country percentage caps. There's nothing specially discriminatory in the law against people from India. It's just that there's massive amounts of temporary-worker immigration from there, which crashes hard against the other quotas. If German immigration were equally massive, Germans would have the same problems Indians have now, so the problem has nothing to due with racial or ethnic discrimination.
You could also think of the quotas another way: they're protecting the ability of people from countries other than India to immigrate, so the incoming immigrant stream is more diverse.
This is a legal immigration issue. There are no illegal immigrants on H1Bs waiting for a green card.
This could definitely be fixed or reformed without touching the illegal immigration issue.
I think it's wrong to analogize a large corporation to an individual like that. An individual only has a limited capacity to divide its productive capacity, but a corporation almost has an infinite amount.
One of Apple's problems is that they often take what are probably good ideas too far. Some focus is good, but too much can be bad. Back when Steve Jobs took over, it was probably right for them to hyperfocus on a small number of models and software products, but the situation is different now. There's no good reason for a company as successful as they are now to not give the Mac division the resources and leadership it needs to be successful. Unfortunately, they seem to be neglecting it instead.