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by UncleOxidant
1347 days ago
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I can think of another aspect of the badness: It's bad for geographical regions that have become dependent on the company. Intel is Oregon's largest private employer, for example, and most of this employment is in the Portland metro area. If Intel were to go away next year this area would be hit very hard economically. That's not going to happen, of course, but one can imagine a long slow decline. Tektronix used to be a very large employer here - employed about as many at it's peak in the late 80s as Intel employs here now. Tek went into decline in the 90s, fortunately Intel's star was rising then. As Intel's star declines it's tough to see a new replacement for the area. |
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When they can't it's good companies come and go, or Kodak would still be blocking digital cameras (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kodak-bankruptcy-idUSTRE8...) but the price we pay is things like wasted effort on re-implementing everything that didn't need to change at the new place, good people can't always move to it as you mention, etc.
Different countries at different times adopt different positions on the scale between inefficient (?) state-linked monopolies with jobs for life and letting the market do its thing. I'm not sure what factor means that sometimes we end up with Samsung and other times British Leyland.
That itself is an example of capitalism as the least worst option... similarly how much effort goes into trading currencies or commodities or whatever just so people get a fair price and aren't screwed over by whoever is the only person selling at the moment they need something. But we're self-interested, biased, and this is the workaround (or the system that emerges from our nature - self-interest is turned into the energy behind it all and "greed is good").