The Cost of Financialization-Globalization: You Lost $500k and Gained $137.13

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-cost-of-financialization.html

by Melchizedek • 4 years ago

105 135 4 years ago

charleshughsmith.blogspot.com

mjburgess5• 4 years ago

This is just an extremely poorly informed rant. It's premised on a zero-sum view of economics, where any change in distribution is necessarily a loss for some and a gain for others. And a view that the shape of the distribution, rather than its height, is the only factor in quality of life.

These are both profoundly misguided. In the last several decades QoL has improved dramatically, as has the amount of disposable income available to every household: the distribution is higher. And the main reason for increasing inequality in the distribution, is the rate of investment returns... ie., different rates of gain -- not money being "stolen".

marginalia_nu10• 4 years ago

How would you counter someone who argues that given hedonic adaptation, they'll be roughly as happy regardless of QoL as long as their base needs are met.

rosndo9• 4 years ago

Research has largely shown this theory to be false.

Recent one: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/money-matters-to-happiness-...

roenxi2• 4 years ago

Happiness isn't the be all and end all. Even if that is true we should take actions that make life objectively better - doing things that increase lifespans, health, leisure, safety, etc.

mjburgess5• 4 years ago

I think the only people who get angry at the shape of the distribution are those who get angry at the shape of the distribution.

In other words, envy towards "the better off" is not a general feature of human experience. It is of some, but not all. One of the cultural triumphs of the west has been, somehow who knows, to mitigate envy (ie., hostility towards those who have more).

So that most people today think "I'm grateful that I can do xyz, who cares that Musk can do o,p,q".

People who write articles like this are the people "on the (envy) treadmill", and this isnt a cheap attack: they really are suffering! For them, it is a daily stress to see others have more.

Society should do more to understand how this comes about, and what can be done to ameliorate this issue. It seems most acute in the "almost rich", i'm guessing because the condition of being rich seems available, but they cant get it. Whereas poorer people don't even think its an option.

Given the amount of such possible "elites" we are producing today, who will never be elite, this is a politically unstable situation.

kesor6• 4 years ago

The main point is the productivity/production has been shifted elsewhere. Once upon a time if you wanted to be wealthy, you had to produce physical stuff. Today you just find somewhere else in the world where people are forced to produce for pennies and you make them produce cheap crap for you, while the west does a lot less production than its potential and mostly just reaps the benefits.

But the problem is not that production was mostly removed as the enabler to buy stuff. The real huge problem in the last 45 years is that the constraints on financing were removed.

Once upon a time in order to buy cheap labor from another country, you had to pay with something physical, probably something you actually produced. Today you can just punch a key on your keyboard and give them extra numbers that are backed by nothing really, there is no need to produce anymore.

When the only constraint on production is to find more fools to produce for you, eventually you run out of fools.

Broken_Hippo2• 4 years ago

"The main point is the productivity/production has been shifted elsewhere. Once upon a time if you wanted to be wealthy, you had to produce physical stuff. Today you just find somewhere else in the world where people are forced to produce for pennies and you make them produce cheap crap for you, while the west does a lot less production than its potential and mostly just reaps the benefits."

This just isn't true. People were wealthy slave owners and got rich because you had forced labor. You didn't even have to pay them pennies. We have a long history of unpaid labor, globally, and the fact that we still have low-and-unpaid labor shouldn't be a surprise (even if we find it wrong now). Lawyers have been somewhat well-to-do for some generations now, alongside other things you had to go off to college for, and I'm not sure they produced anything either. Perhaps not in the US, but churches were freaking wealthy at one time too, and I can't really think of things they consistently produced either. Same for royals: They didn't directly produce anything.

sokoloff2• 4 years ago

Taking away someone else’s best option rarely leaves that person better off (especially in the short-run)

Barrin922• 4 years ago

The fact is your household lost $500,000 in earnings and gained essentially nothing in supposed "cost savings

I assume 'you' in this piece isn't addressing the people in this circle[1]. I mean even the extremely wrong basis for that quoted claim aside (anyone who has visited an electronics store and compares quality and price to pre-globalization can verify that for themselves), I always find it funny how anyone can think globalization hasn't drastically improved the world we live in. It's somewhat bizarre to me that support for globalisation is being attributed to shills and some financialied elite. I don't know which 70s the author grew up in but I don't think a minimum wage worker had a pristine supercomputer in their pocket and a big flatscreen tv on the wall.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle#/media/Fi...

mjburgess5• 4 years ago

When remembering past decades they identify themselves with the top 1% on the basis of having 70s 1%-markers today (eg., a degree, etc.). What has happened is that the markers of the 70s 1% are now of the c. 50% today.

The author should be mapping the life of a 70th percentile person across all the decades... till the late 70s, that person was a poor industrial worker.

andrepd7• 4 years ago

This is false. See https://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compen.... Income inequality has massively increased since the end of Bretton Woods and the start of the era of neoliberalism, deregulation, financialisation, and Reagan/Thatcher. Productivity increased while median (not top!) compensation remains stagnant.

notahacker4• 4 years ago

Apart from anything else, globalisation and financialization aren't the same phenomenon. You can slash tax on the rich and deregulate financial services at the same time as you stick up massive trade barriers and provide corporate welfare to domestic companies. And you can remove barriers to imports whilst regulating banking and m&a more, levying super taxes and expanding the welfare state (The latter bit is more difficult if you're a small developing country, but the US clearly isn't.)

Seems as unreasonable to blame the people who assemble your iPhone for Reaganomics as it does to accuse them of making consumer goods substantially worse than the great phones we had in the 1970s!

dd364• 4 years ago

These defenses based on how technology has improved are weak and hollow. Is the suggestion that technology would not have improved as quickly if quality of life had remained the same?

Single worker households, healthcare, education, home prices, etc. being what they were in the 1970s would’ve prevented LED TVs and iPhones? Really?

sdoering9• 4 years ago

I admit I have no first hand experience about the US part, but I read a lot of stories about rural or even city infrastructure in the US and oftentimes can't help but think that in a lot of countries I grew up as being labeled 3rd world/developing countries the infrastructure is of significantly better quality.

So sometimes I am not sure how much of the US is (in parts) a developing country in disguise?

And from 1st hand experience I can only say that I have to come to that conclusion for parts of Germany (where I am from and living). There are big-ish areas in Germany where you can't call emergency services from a mobile phone as there is not one carrier servicing these areas. If you happen to have an emergency there - good luck.

But as only a few people live there it doesn't make economic sense to service these areas and build the necessary infrastructure for the service provider companies. So these areas go unserved.

CPLX• 4 years ago

I always find it funny how anyone can think globalization hasn't drastically improved the world we live in.

Have you been to Detroit?

andrepd7• 4 years ago

anyone who has visited an electronics store

Great, now do rent. Healthcare. Education.

But hey at least we have iPhones with 73 cameras and cutting-edge CPUs which we use to browse instagram.

nneonneo• 4 years ago

Funny, access to healthcare and education don’t seem to be big deals in most of the developed world. I wonder why the US needs to be an exception? I don’t think the answer is financialization and globalization, but rather the aggressive privatization of healthcare and education. That seems like it’d be a problem whether or not the US was economically connected to the rest of the world.

ako• 4 years ago

Maybe it's the other way around: rent, healthcare, education haven't benefitted as much from globalization as electronics. Rent is based on local supply, not cheap china factories churning out cheap housing. Same for healthcare, mostly limited by local wages. Same for education, mostly limited by local wages.

Image no globalization for electronics as well, it'd be as unafordable as the other 3 today.

Barrin922• 4 years ago

The funny thing is you've picked three sectors that aren't even exposed to globalization! People don't compete globally for American homes or healthcare (and wealthy foreigners actually subsidize schools). The rise in cost is a result of cost disease. Americans now live in houses that are 150% larger than in 1980, with fewer people living in each home. And overall many cities are not building enough of them.

Your logic is exactly the wrong way around. If Americans could consume global education or healthcare it'd be much cheaper, the same way everything else has gotten cheaper. Let Asian construction firms actually built some homes in California instead of stopping everyone from doing that and you'd be surprised how affordable your housing is going to be.

Right now in the US you can't even buy health insurance across state lines. not only is that not a global market, it's not even a national market! The three sectors uniquely shielded from global as well as local competition are the ones that have exploded in cost. That is a lot of things, but surely not an argument against more open markets.

andrepd7• 4 years ago

I don't know which 70s the author grew up in but I don't think a minimum wage worker had a pristine supercomputer in their pocket and a big flatscreen tv on the wall.

Yes, I know that you cannot afford housing, or decent healthcare, or access credit, that childhood poverty has increased, that you're 100K in debt for getting an education, that worker's rights are being eroded, that we've bailed out the very rich to the tune of trillions for the second time in a little over a decade... but have you considered that in the 70s you didn't have a Samsung Galaxy Pro S37+ Ultra©™? /s

I can't believe I'm reading this, it's the stereotypical "consoom" meme.

dd364• 4 years ago

I can’t tell if it’s a joke?

notahacker4• 4 years ago

Other stuff being bad (mostly for reasons other than globalization) is irrelevant to the obvious absurdity of the claim in the original article that globalization didn't allow us to have more consumer goods for less, it just made the consumer goods worse. The claim being addressed was that consumer electronics are so much worse than the consumer electronics of the 1970s it cancels out price cuts: he even makes up a number to go with it! You can't defend instances of the "everything was better in the good old days" meme as laughably specific as saying we're $2000 worse off buying modern appliances than 1970s ones by pointing to other stuff where the evidence might not point in the opposite direction.

glogla2• 4 years ago

I don't know which 70s the author grew up in but I don't think a minimum wage worker had a pristine supercomputer in their pocket and a big flatscreen tv on the wall.

But they might have had available healthcare, education, pension and ability to afford a place to live. You could say losing all those for tvs (that are just ad delivery mechanisms people have been duped into paying for) and smartphones (that are mostly ad delivery mechanisms people have been duped into paying for) is a good trade, but a lot of people seems to disagree.

reactspa• 4 years ago

Also, the article author thinks that U.S. borders can be hermetically sealed. Even if American companies were to recreate all those companies, and rehire all the people, China will still be able to make TVs, Computers and Phones at one-fifth of the price.

How does he propose stopping those goods from entering the U.S. if the U.S. (presumably) wants to export to those countries?

My cheap Chinese-made Android phone is a remarkable piece of work. Not junk for sure.

mercy_dude• 4 years ago

Geniuses in the party of Davos, not original people.

coderintherye• 4 years ago

"B-b-but wait, didn't we all save a fortune on cheap jeans and TVs? No, you lost on that, too, as every product was crapified by globalization"

Cites no sources other than his own blog post in which he rants about the IRS (and also doesn't cite any sources).

nottorp6• 4 years ago

Hmm. Nice rant against the meta financial products with which i kind of agree.

But his appliance example... let's put $500 from 1975 into an inflation calculator. Oops, they're worth $2600 ish 2022 dollars. Versus the $400 cheap option.

Edit: also globalization will stay no matter how protectionist the state is. In the black market.

kesor6• 4 years ago

Globalization is the new slavery. Once upon a time you force-brought cheap labor to work on your plantation and paid them with food basically. Today the slaves do their work in China and you pay them with printed dollars backed by nothing.

nottorp6• 4 years ago

Yeah those poor slaves queueing at Foxconn's gates to get a job assembling iphones for the evil american consumer. Because it pays a lot more than tending the rice fields like their parents.

Just for the record, I'm eastern european and slaving for the evil american tech firms ;)

dr_dshiv• 4 years ago

Except it’s not slavery, which is in fact the key difference.

Aunche2• 4 years ago

Spoken like someone who as never met a Chinese factory worker before. Today's Foxconn workers have much more comfortable lives than their parents who were working a factories making low quality trinkets. The generation before that were largely peasants who lived through famine.

printed dollars backed by nothing

If it were backed by nothing they wouldn't accept it. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. China is receiving more steel, oil, and pork than ever by exchanging it with dollars.

lb1lf• 4 years ago

I'll recycle a comment I made in another thread a few years ago:

When clearing out my grandmother's house a few years ago, my uncle and I almost broke our backs trying to get the freezer out. It felt like it weighed a ton, even empty. My grandmother told us it had been a wedding present, and that they had been totally awestruck at the time at the generous present from her parents-in-law. After all, a decent freezer cost at least 2,000 kroner! (At this time, the average yearly gross pay was just in excess of 7,000 kroner.) My grandparents married in 1950. Since then, monetary value has been reduced twenty-fold. You can still buy a top-loading freezer for 2,000 kroner; I just checked. So - in 1950, you had to work for five months to earn money for a freezer (after taxes.) In 2017, I have to work one day for a freezer (after taxes.)

ant6n• 4 years ago

But the old freezer would last 150 years, whereas the new one would last 1 year. ;-)

Ekaros• 4 years ago

So Mercantilism would be preferable? No more importing anything, just using local resources locally? Maybe for USA just do away with inter-state commerce too. Can't have that ruin things, locally produced and build food, shelter and clothing. By own hands.

kesor6• 4 years ago

That is not what the article said. It would be preferable to produce real physical stuff everywhere in the world. Instead of using printed money to avoid production and still being able to buy everything someone else produced for you.

If you produce real things, and you have excess, you can use that excess to trade with other countries/states that have excess. But the USA for at least 30 years had a deficit, covered by debt, covered by printed dollars. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOPGSTB

nly• 4 years ago

What about services?

trabant00• 4 years ago

Products getting cheaper and lower quality is a spiral I'm not sure how we are going to escape. As production "optimizes" for cost the first place they look at is wages. Low wage consumers look for the cheapest thing out there out of necessity.

Quality goods are very much a niche product these days. Economics of scale make them even more expensive than they otherwise would be. Even middle class consumers find it hard to swallow the price of a 200$ tshirt so they mostly buy Pakistan made 10$ ones, with all the environment, social, moral, etc, problems that come with that.

What's the alternative and how do we get there? I can't even begin to imagine.

kesor6• 4 years ago

The alternative is what we had 50 years ago, quality products, quality mindset, longer term thinking.

With how the corporations are set up today, it makes sense for them to reduce wages and quality to the minimum. Corporations only see the profit in the near term, and really don't care about the future of mankind on the long term all that much - those who do get crushed by competition.

There is some talk about faking it with ESG mandates, I personally doubt its anything more than lip service.

Broken_Hippo2• 4 years ago

I don't think we had a "quality mindset" at the time. We were just limited in technology.

Example: Safety features make cars better quality, yet manufacturers haven't exactly lined up to implement them early. We didn't take arsenic fabrics off the market for... well, a long time. I don't know about you, but I expect a quality product not to poison me. We used to sell breads with additives in them if we could.

"Quality mindset" is just a scam of nostalgic thinking. The products were simply different back then.

rosndo9• 4 years ago

Really been chugging the survivorship bias kool-aid, haven’t we?

thinkharderdev3• 4 years ago

50 years ago would be 1972. In 1972 if you were filling up the gas tank of the best-selling vehicle you would be filling the gas tank of a VW Beetle with gasoline infused with a potent neuro-toxin. None of that screams quality or long-term thinking to me.

rosndo9• 4 years ago

Products getting cheaper and lower quality is a spiral I'm not sure how we are going to escape

This is an imaginary spiral. Well, except for the products getting cheaper. That is a good thing.

thinkharderdev3• 4 years ago

I'm not at all sure that this is true beyond some very specific products. Clothing probably fits this model (modern "fast fashion" clothing is really cheap crap that will not last) but for most other products, things are getting both cheaper and higher quality.

sokoloff2• 4 years ago

I would be more likely to buy a Ferrari before I’d buy a $200 T-shirt.

“I’ll trade you 2 T-shirts for a month of groceries for my household” seems utterly non-sensical to me.

0 - https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/how-much-should-i...

tommy5dollar• 4 years ago

Crapification of stuff is good, you don't need a pair of jeans that lasts 400 years that you pass down to your grandchildren and most people don't want to save up for years (or take out financial products) to "invest" in furniture. The previous high quality of goods was a bug, not a feature.

forgotmypw17• 4 years ago

When you consider that every pair of jeans, crappy or good, has a hidden cost of several gallons of burned diesel, several square meters of razed wildlands, and many kilos of natural resources that needed to be collected, processed, transported, reprocessed, re-transported, several times over, it's hard to call that a feature.

Think about all the cotton, then thread, then cloth, plus dye, plus metal, plus other thread for putting it together, all the transportation and machinery, all the manual labor in poor conditions, and so on, which go into that cheap pair of jeans. Now, consider that every time you buy a pair, you're voting for more of that to happen. Now, consider the environmental and habitat cost to us and the rest of the world contained in that one "cheap" pair of jeans.

I would not call that a feature.

andrepd7• 4 years ago

I can't believe I'm reading on this website, when the last drum of oil has been burnt shipping fast fashion and useless plastic junk across the world and the air is too thick with smoke to breathe, at least we'll know it was all for the best, for we got to swap jeans every 3 months rather than every 5 years.

originalvichy• 4 years ago

Finance, like the democratic process, should be explainable to your average person.

If it can’t be explained, it is ripe for exploitation by ones who spend most of their time trying to find loopholes to get wealthy off of some esoteric financial instruments. Much like clever MMO doing their best to find bugs in the game and find things like duplication glitches.

If it can’t be explained it is going to create a new global papacy that we have to defer our earthly futures to in hopes that they will find the magic cure for our stagnating incomes.

Much of it can’t be explained and that’s why we can’t vote our way to a world that doesn’t give the wealthy and their foot soldiers an unfair advantage to use financial instrument tricks to gain vast amounts of on-paper-wealth that can then be used to repeat the process.

Even though this is a shoot from the hip blog it does point at the fact that while globalization has seemingly made some costs cheaper for wealthy westerners, it also made the ones who planned and executed this shift many times more money.

thinkharderdev3• 4 years ago

I'm not sure that this is a great heuristic. Most of the financial instruments that, for example, were at the root of the 2007-9 financial crisis are relatively easy to explain (you can find innumerable articles providing explanations of what a CDO is that I believe the average person can understand quite easily).

Even though this is a shoot from the hip blog it does point at the fact that while globalization has seemingly made some costs cheaper for wealthy westerners

Arguably the largest benefits of globalization has been the global poor and not wealthy westerners. In some cases this has come at the expense of the western middle and working class (who are ~85th percentile globally) in specific sectors, which is why I think it is so contentious in the west.

NoLinkToMe6• 4 years ago

This really is a terribly written article, wouldn't get a passing grade for a high school student. There's absolutely no coherence to any of the arguments, it's just a rant and poor understanding of finance. I'd like to be more concrete in my criticisms but honestly I don't even know where to start.

There's an idea about financialisation, which is just completely wrong: he notes companies are willing to pay $20 billion for a $10 billion company, after selling it off for its pieces, and noting no value has been added.

Typically the reverse happens, companies get merged for economies of scale, thereby adding value through efficiency.

Sometimes companies are broken up because the individual pieces don't work well together anymore and create strategic issues, e.g. because a company has two units moving into two different directions, and require completely different strategy, people, ideas, customers, financing approach etc. e.g. a newspaper company that has a journalist branch that produces news, and a factory branch that produces printed (news)paper. That may have worked before. But in a digital age, journalists want to focus on news, and paper printing businesses on paper printing. You can lose value by tying these companies together under one CEO, one strategy, one financing model. You can add value by disentangling, letting them focus on their core business.

The notion you can routinely magically just sell for 20 billion, what you purchased for 10, without adding value, is I hope obviously nonsense.

Then there's a whole piece on globalisation... again, not sure where to start. The big claim is it reduces quality and this is a net loss for everyone, and that second, personal income has been dropping for decades. In reality, quality changes are well studied and part of inflation data, and personal income after inflation adjustment has been increasing for decades. [0]

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI

pydry5• 4 years ago

There's an idea about financialisation, which is just completely wrong: he notes companies are willing to pay $20 billion for a $10 billion company, after selling it off for its pieces, and noting no value has been added.

This is just one face of financialization.It's known as asset stripping and it has a long wikipedia page so my sophomoric take is that it's probably real, but I'd be interested to see your rebuttal to it nonetheless.

Typically the reverse happens, companies get merged for economies of scale

They typically get merged to bolster market power and they say that it's for economies of scale because it sounds like it's in the consumers interest rather than diametrically opposed to it and that's how to get mergers approved.

Anybody who has worked in a large multinational corporation of stitched together mergers could tell you just how kafkaesque the diseconomies of scale can be.

Then there's a whole piece on globalisation... again, not sure where to start

Maybe don't.

sdoering9• 4 years ago

I remember when my employer (together with a whole bunch of other agencies) got bought by a global consulting company.

Towards us employees as well as to the market the talk was always to generate better opportunities that one agency alone would not be able to target (read win pitches from the big corporations).

Shortly thereafter we were the biggest digital agency in ASGR (Austria, Switzerland, Germany & Russia) and every MD was clapping themselves on the shoulder for achieving this. Nobody seemed to mind that the status came because of a big shopping spree by Accenture and not from natural growth. And what does it actually mean to be the biggest?

But I have yet to see said opportunities being won after nearly 5 years.

Sure there were some big wins. But in the end the existing agency brands won these pitches, not because they were part of Accenture (Interactive) but brought their own DNA and approach to the table. On the contrary - having to price in the Accenture overhead either led to loosing because of being too expensive or the necessity to offshore most work to India (or nearshore towards Eastern Europe).

55555• 4 years ago

From the Wikipedia page mentioned:

Early innovators of asset stripping were Carl Icahn, Victor Posner, and Nelson Peltz;[4] all of whom were investors in the 1970s and 1980s. Carl Icahn performed one of the most notorious and hostile takeovers when he acquired Trans World Airlines in 1985. Here Icahn stripped TWA of its assets, selling them individually to repay the debt assimilated during the takeover. This particular corporate raid formed the idea of selling a company's assets in order to repay debt, and eventually increase the raider's net worth.

pas2• 4 years ago

Obviously it's real, but it's done because the expected value for the parties that do it is net positive. Again, obviously, it's like a gamble, sometimes it fails, sometimes it works "great".

But. The main point is, healthy corporations are not taken over in leveraged buyouts and whatnots. Companies that would be bankrupt soon are the targets. In that sense these raiders for their own gain what the bankruptcy proceedings does anyway.

mergers

Yes, mergers lead to hilariously inefficient giants. And if it goes through the consolidation it manages to be more profitable than the "mergees" together. If it fails, well, eventually they'll lose market share and close, or sell of their parts, or one of the aforementioned corporate raiders does this for them, and so on.

However, many times the really big mergers are about simple oligopoly. At that point there's just no real competition between these entrenched already-giant entities. The diseconomies are already there.

sdoering9• 4 years ago

Just being curious. Could you explain the graph in [0]? I just don't understand it. Probably because as a non US citizen I for example already don't know what Chained Dollars are.

If I made 50k in say 2012 and now make 52k in 2022. Did my spendable income increase?

The linked graph would imply that imho.

djoldman• 4 years ago

It means that US average income, taking into account inflation, has risen.

Joeri• 4 years ago

In the tech sphere, what you are saying does not seem to bear out. Tech mergers or buyouts often reduce the value of the combined companies from what it was when they were separate, and usually don't create economies of scale. Tech buyouts seem to fall into three categories: (1) reducing competition (e.g. facebook buying whatsapp and instagram), (2) acquihiring and sunsetting the acquired products (e.g. most purchases apple has made), and (3) hold and sell at markup without having created any of the added value (e.g. softbank's acquisition of ARM). I find it hard to think of tech mergers and buyouts which actually work the way you say these things work.

pas2• 4 years ago

Instagram was able to scale due to FB. Of course it reduced the competition, but at the same time the other platforms that were not acquired just withered away (Kik? Snapchat apparently has 4B revenue, and ~20M USD net profit, which is basically 0 compared to IG).

And it's also telling that no other giant felt to enter this space (Google after G+ just started to focus on B2B cloud/workspaces, and their B2C is limited to Youtube (Premium) and Android (Pixel and AndroidOne)).

Basically the only real competition is TikTok, which is made possible by high resolution/definition smartphone cameras and displays, and a ~10 second attention span. (Which is still more than the doomscrolling on IG/FB.) But since their revenue share model is very hostile/unfair to creators, in its current form it'll eventually hit a ceiling. (Or not, predictions are just predictions.)

ARM

SoftBank found a buyer for ARM, but authorities stepped in. Is this good or bad?

On one hand it would have created a lot of added value for Nvida, so it would have been a mergers success story. But on the other hand Nvidia would have extorted the market (allegedly!) so it would have created (yet another) success story for the "capitalism bad" ongoing highly acclaimed ideology series.

Apple

People seem to love Apple (people buy their expensive gadgets, like there's no tomorrow), and their acquisitions (like the well known laser drilled holes, and CNC machined bodies for their laptops [0]) allowed them to deliver those high quality gadgets with enormous profits.

Likely their acquihires are providing them a lot of added value ... and people seem to agree that Apple is good. So maybe acquihire is good too?

[0] https://blog.bolt.io/manufacture-like-apple/

NoLinkToMe6• 4 years ago

Apple has famously stated it buys a company every 2 to 3 weeks. That's not the type of Yahoo buying Tumblr purchases. It's companies that have technology, skills, products, networks, that are improving Apple's products in a way the average customer can't just observe. Of course they're not going to be talked about because there's often nothing to talk about compared to say the Tumblr story.

aiisahik• 4 years ago

This guy has a degree in "Comparative Philosophy" and thus this blog article should be viewed as such: philosophical rant

boksiora• 4 years ago

You may not like it, but this is what peak capitalism looks like

The Cost of Financialization-Globalization: You Lost $500k and Gained $137.13

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