You want your iPod, you’re gonna have to take your globe-straddling ethically dubious multinational corporations.

Change things,go out and start a business.

How does anyone starting a business change any of this?  It’s a fine idea but I don’t see how it’s actually a solution.

@boingboing-ecce52d2814bbd95c1ca72ce575dea4f:disqus :

You want change?  Take a risk.

Similarly useless.  Taking risks is necessary but not sufficient.

I agree that large  income inequality problem between individuals in a society, but why is it bad that there are large, interconnected companies?

1. Large, interconnected companies operate at such a scale that a relatively small amount of their operating budget can amount to an absolutely huge sum in terms of campaign contributions or lobbying. 2. Large, interconnected companies are moral hazards — they are “too big to fail.”  If Rio Tinto were to pull out of Australia that would significantly impact Australia’s GDP and employment rates (negatively); as a result, Rio Tinto has the Australian government over a barrel to a certain extent.Points (1) and (2) suggest how large, interconnected firms can gain heavy-handed influence over government policies even in nominal democracies.  It gets worse:3. Large firms can temporarily undersell smaller competitors to prevent competition.4. Due to (1) and (2), large firms can pressure government to legislate the economic activity in question in such a way that the large firm or large firms in general become privileged or advantaged over smaller firms.There’s more, but I think both liberals and conservatives can agree that those are four bad things about big firms.  I won’t bother with arguments that will seem more partisan.

Large corporations have lots of capital, but they also employ hundreds of thousands of people. And produce goods efficiently.

Large corporations employ lots of people.  I’m not sure why that’s necessarily a good thing: I’d prefer the hardware guy at Walmart running his own store.  And whether they produce goods “efficiently” is a matter of how you define “efficiency”.  As cheap as possible in dollar terms?  Then you’re probably being incredibly inefficient in terms of fossil fuel use and somewhat inefficient in terms of consumer safety.  It’s a tradeoff. 

The US system maybe gives them too much political power, but that’s a fault of the government, not of corporations.

I don’t understand how you arrive at this conclusion.  When a bribe is made there are two suspects, not one.  Besides that, “the government” isn’t some metaphysical agency, it is another institution run by human beings who respond to incentives.  Large firms inevitably create incentives for regulators to look the other way, legislators to legislate in favor of large firms, etc.  Small firms would too but they don’t have the economy of scale to pull it off as effectively.

And isn’t complicated, economic interaction GOOD? Doesn’t that have a stabilizing effect on the economy and international politics?

Complicated economic interaction IS good.  That’s why everything being owned by 137 firms or whatever is BAD.  The analysis in the paper shows an economy in which everything interacts with one big node.  Complicated economic interaction would be indicated by lots of diffuse nodes or no obvious nodes at all.

I wonder how many people here have ever seen a person with advanced leprosy in real life.

Not me!  Pictures were gruesome enough.  But I read those Donaldson books ;) 

You do want factories next to your home.  Factories that are so brilliantly conceived and executed that they do not impact your quality of life negatively – factories where the logistics of moving people, products, information and money for the benefit of you and your fellow human beings have been managed so that the neigborhood does not suffer from pollution, congestion, noise, RF/EMI, etc. etc.  Factories that you would want to work in, factories that you would want to buy product from.

Factories don’t really have to suck.  Mostly, they suck because we’ve decided we’ll stick them in somebody else’s backyard – so we can avoid finding solutions to these problems.

Like what?  Prove this statement.

Not all regulation is bad.  I don’t want shale-fracking causing natural gas leaks into my drinking water, I don’t want factories abutting my home, I want to know what I’m buying really is what they claim it is, etc.  Free-market conservatives imagine that the marketplace is some pure and logic bound deity above the human fray that will lead the way if we just let it.  That is a myth.  It is ultimately defined and run by people with all their prejudices, urges to cheat, greed and so on.  We saw this with the collapse of the deregulated financial markets.  The marketplace should be there to serve us, we aren’t here to serve it.

“It is possible for everyone in the world to be rich.”  Rich is relative.  A poor American is rich compared to a poor third worlder.  Once you are comfortable the rest is fluff.  The issue here is that much wealth in such a small number of hands creates a huge power imbalance.

Granted the managers of the companies and funds have undue influence, but it is due to individuals and pension plans voluntarily handing over their assets to them.

It didn’t take much to get called “conspiracy theorist” by a group of unworldly 20-somethings conditioned by academia to reject anything not in the Canon of Accepted Dicta. 

Comeback when librarians rule the world.

On top of those Marines, please also have a chat with these “librarians” as well, sugar pie.

http://www.occupypolice.org/

While the crop failure was caused by potato blight, the famine was caused by government policy.  Reread your history.

It was caused by landlords evicting their tenants to use their land for higher profit-yielding purposes.  The role that the government played in the disaster was in failing to regulate the use of private property.  Ireland during the Great Famine was a libertarian paradise.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29#Landlords_and_tenants

Within each of us is a Steve Jobs waiting to get out.

The average IQ is 100.  Within each of us is more likely a Homer Simpson waiting to get out.

Too bad the majority of information pathways are owned and controlled by those you wish to take down.

Yes, and I’m sure they are all just itching to shut down their sources of revenue (billions per day) at the behest of Obama, correct? (but more on this later)

And if the gov has a flip switch on the internets (pretty sure they do), it doesn’t matter much.

There’s no “flip switch” to the entire Internet in the United States.  The president would have to “issue a declaration of a national cyberemergency” and then many different disparate entities would have to comply to make it all “not” work…  all at once.  This isn’t impossible, but it is currently near impossible to pull off.

It would also require massive revenue losses by many individual entities who would have to joyfully comply as well.  And we know how much corporations love to go without their precious revenue because someone like Obama tells them to do something.

As I already mentioned in my first post, some corporatists are certainly trying to make this more possible to pull off with so-called Internet ‘kill switch’ bills:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20029282-281.html?tag=topStories1

That would only enable them to TRY bringing down the Internet.  There would be a lengthy appeal process for numerous entities and in the meantime…  other things would happen, but I’ll continue in that vein after your next quote…

i’m pretty sure they will use gov. force if theres any widespread uprising against them.

Government “force” in this day and information age is an archaic, counterproductive  measure that only backfires and creates massive blowback in places like the United States of Connected Cameras.  Tony Baloney  dramatically helped spread the OWS movement through his violent actions, not hinder it.

Read: In the Networked World, Police Violence Is a Gift for #OccupyWallStreet Protesters

The more violent the authorities get, the more people are supporting and joining the OWS movement.  Many correctly “thank” Tony Baloney for helping to spark major growth in the movement.

Go ahead, send in 1000 more Tony Baloneys and watch the movement spread like absolute wildfire.  Pray they’re that stupid. Pray we’re that lucky.

- – - – - - – - – - - – - – - - – - – - - – - – - - – - – - - – - – - 

So, let’s say they actually do “shut down” the entire Internet for the USA?

Pray they’re that stupid. Pray we’re that lucky.

That would be the biggest tactical blunder ever known in modern information warfare for many reasons.  For one, they would open a pandora’s box they could never close again.  Ever heard of MAKERS?

Myself and many others have been working on Internet alternatives for over a decade and they are now ready to roll, my friend.  They make the Internet in a suitcase that was rolled out by the Obama administration when Egypt, etc. shut down its Internet look like child’s play.

Squash the traditional Internet and a mesh Internet will take the United States by storm and permanently take most of the Internet access away from large corporations (and the profits that go with it).  And even worse for our corporatist friends it would be more difficult than ever to wiretap our communications because encryption would become the norm instead of the exception it is today.

Begin transmission of priceless information:
http://contactcon.com/
http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/images/f/fe/Building_a_Rural_Wireless_Mesh_Network_-_A_DIY_Guide_v0.7_65.pdf
http://www.shareable.net/blog/peep-wireless-proposes-a-peer-to-peer-cell-network

It’s already too late for the corporatists to bottle this.  The question is, do they want this mesh Internet technology to continue to move forward like a swollen river… or do they want this to become a tsunami that sweeps the nation with their pants down?

The smarter corporatists already know the proper answer and they are helpless to stop us, they can only the decelerate the flow… decelerate the inevitable.  Drip… Drop… Drip… Drop…

Expect us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecG-JKiCu_8

The answer is out there, bkad, and it’s looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to.

That is a very religious-sounding argument. Those who agree with you are enlightened; those who do not are blind. And this belief, as you describe it, is volitional (it will find you if you want it to), a choice rather than a response to evidence. I am unpersuaded so far. But there’s enough of your coreligionists here that you’re in good company. I don’t need to waste your time.