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Solkanar512 posted:Why, just out of curiosity? Do they typically not offer large portions of themselves up for sale? Are there limits to the amount of stock that can legally be held by foreign companies? I don't know the specifics, but probably closer to the latter, or the courts just saying nuh-uh. The strong protectionist streak is probably more out of xenophobia than anything but still smart policy for a relatively smaller country facing its iconic industries potentially getting bought out by random multinationals and taking the profits offshore. Also probably why the video game industry remains strong there given the entire history in the US is basically studios getting bought out and/or going broke and getting strip-mined/scattered to the winds so they can never make games of the same quality again.
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Nov 2, 2020 06:08
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Its also because most big publishers in Japan are owned by larger conglomerates or they have other vested businesses that are also profitable but make them unattractive for a stock buyout. Konami and gambling, Bandai-Namco and 8 million toys, Fromsoft (owned by Kadokawa) with like a dozen other investments.
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Nov 2, 2020 06:14
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I'm having a hard time even thinking of a case where there was a sale of a major Japanese game IP to a foreign publisher.
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Nov 2, 2020 08:32
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I'm struggling to think of a good reason any company should be allowed to buy another company.
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Nov 2, 2020 20:03
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Beachcomber posted:I'm struggling to think of a good reason any company should be allowed to buy another company. Any company that is looking to sell or offshore their operations should have to first offer to sell to the employees at fair market value.
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Nov 2, 2020 20:05
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is pepsi ok posted:Any company that is looking to sell or offshore their operations should have to first offer to sell to the employees at fair market value.
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Nov 2, 2020 20:12
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Cicero posted:How would that work? Like, employees come up with enough collective savings to turn it into a coop? Yeah, ideally you would spin up a government agency to help with this process. Employees would hold a vote and if it passes they could work with the agency to overhaul the organizational structure and provide a government backed loan to facilitate everything with favorable terms to get them through the transition period. It's more or less the non-revolutionary path to socialism that Richard Wolff advocates. Jeremy Corbyn ran on something similar in 2016: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/jeremy-corbyn-unveils-right-own-john-lewis-style-employee-ownership-policy-1581548
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Nov 2, 2020 20:19
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My job is helping people do exactly that, convert existing businesses into worker co-ops in the US. Work is primarily funded through USDA co-op development grants but cities like NY and Madison have local develipment funds dedicated to co-ops and conversions as well. The Main Street Employment Act (a Trump policy) mandated that the SBA start providing loans and technical assistance to conversion projects as well but they've dragged their feet on it for years now. Loan officers love to pretend its impossible to lend to a co-op corporation without a personal garauntee despite the fact that they do this for C-corps all the time. Basically co-op businesses outperform capitalist ones by every measure except (sometimes) generating surplus value for shareholders so of course there are major structural roadblocks to widespread adoption of the model.
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Nov 2, 2020 20:37
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While I consider worker-owned businesses to be the next evolution in economics (put another way, the first permutation of "Post-capitalism"), I am not that keen on it. I am sceptical as to how a worker-owned company can compete with a highly exploitative private one and, frankly, I don't trust anything with a profit motive. Worker owned or not, I don't see how a company, that exists by its nature to make profit, is going to refrain from destroying the environment, buying out politicians and doing horribly unethical things to make numbers go up. I am much more sympathetic to the idea of utilitarian-type groups whose goal is to satisfy needs without a profit motive. Provide goods and services without the ultimate goal being "make more numbers", essentially.
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Nov 3, 2020 01:12
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Luckily worker co-operative business are NOT motivated by profit and the wealth of experience and literature on the topic demonstrates that they are perfectly capable, and typically do, compete and outcompete capitalist firms in every industry and sector with drastically reduced externalities and harm! The issue is you are thinking of a co-op as a corporation where the members are all just equal shareholders, and this is a very incomplete understanding. I'm working on a megathread post but you should look into the 'new cooperativism' emerging in south america and africa which is basically exactly what you're describing. It is TRUE that many high profile American CONSUMER co-ops have succumbed to isomorphism and increasingly resemble capitalist corporations (to their universal detriment, the primary cause of demutualization outside of some kind of market catastrophe is co-ops abandoning their identity as co-ops). Worker co-ops don't usually have this problem and even where they DO, they are universally better than their capitalist counterparts. Unfortunately unincirporated associations that do not engage in commerce do not typically gain much traction or have much ability to provise for their membershils (outside redistributed appropriated value in the form of donations/grants) so while I take your point about the model being not exactly the ideal, its the single most effective tool that we have for enabling workers to own and control productive means. I forget who but I know someone said this was very important. Edit: For the record those are all totally normal and reasonable concerns, when I said luckily above I meant literally 'thank god' and not some snarky thing. Crumbskull fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Nov 3, 2020 |
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Nov 3, 2020 01:20
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Crumbskull posted:I'm working on a megathread post Hell yeah, I'm excited to read this from someone with first hand experience.
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Nov 3, 2020 01:25
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The best pizza place in silicon valley became a co-op. Sadly, we haven't been able to patronize them since covid, but hopefully they'll weather this.
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Nov 3, 2020 01:32
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What pizza place is that? I really miss all the Indian pizza there is in the bay area.
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Nov 3, 2020 01:39
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Cicero posted:What pizza place is that? A Slice of New York in Sunnyvale and San Jose, although we haven't been to the San Jose location. Indian pizza can be pretty good, but I've also had others that tasted...off somehow. We've got one in walking distance that we still haven't tried.
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Nov 3, 2020 01:58
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I was stoked about the Slice of NY conversion. The worker co-op movment has a rich history of pizza places, which is honest to god no poo poo what originally got me interested (used to live a couple blocks from the inner sunset Arizmendi).
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Nov 3, 2020 02:09
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JustJeff88 posted:While I consider worker-owned businesses to be the next evolution in economics (put another way, the first permutation of "Post-capitalism"), I am not that keen on it. I am sceptical as to how a worker-owned company can compete with a highly exploitative private one and, frankly, I don't trust anything with a profit motive. Worker owned or not, I don't see how a company, that exists by its nature to make profit, is going to refrain from destroying the environment, buying out politicians and doing horribly unethical things to make numbers go up. There are probably areas and industries where the ability to externalize parts of your cost structure are critical to (accounting) profits - but the existence of worker coops can actually challenge these industries, in part because frequently such activities are undertaken only quasi-legally, most corporations engage in a kind of monopolistic competition whereby they don't report each other for things like ethics violations or violations of the FCPA, and of course no mere citizen has standing to sue one of these companies for their ridiculous behavior. But if you're actively trying to compete with an ethically challenged company (redundant, obviously) you can sue them if they are breaking the law or dumping etc.. So anyway, they can do a lot of good.
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Nov 3, 2020 04:09
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Yeah, theres a wealth of literature about how co-ops combat the 'market failures' of regulatory capture/monopoly/monosopy etc. In the middle of last century a lot of American co-operative thinkers actually saw what pseudanonymous is describing as THE purpose of co-ops, sort of garauntors of a functioning capitalist market. This is why JustJeff's concerns aren't at all ridiculous, but luckily the movement has moved on from that and largely views itself as the vangaurd of an alternative economy that exists to directly challenge and eventually supplant capitalist enterprise.
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Nov 3, 2020 04:53
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Crumbskull posted:Yeah, theres a wealth of literature about how co-ops combat the 'market failures' of regulatory capture/monopoly/monosopy etc. In the middle of last century a lot of American co-operative thinkers actually saw what pseudanonymous is describing as THE purpose of co-ops, sort of garauntors of a functioning capitalist market. Can I get a link to this?
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Nov 3, 2020 04:58
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There’s a lot of interest in the co-op thread you’ve said you’ll post. Really looking forward to reading it.
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Nov 3, 2020 05:03
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I'm willing to look at anything that challenges the miserable, Earth-destroying system we live in now, but my cynicism runs incredibly deep. That said, I appreciate people actually understanding my concerns and not just writing me off as some emo twat. Ignoring for a moment the elephant in the room that is climate destruction, the wealthier nations of the earth are becoming post scarcity in many areas, and that to me should be a thing of great joy. However, the current system has no interest in creating abundance, which isn't good for profit, and I don't see any alternative that does outside of Soviet-style central planning, which is probably not feasible in terms of logistics and nobody can be trusted with that level of responsibility regardless. I also don't see a solution for things such as "unemployment". Don't get me wrong, I am not one of those "we must create jobs!" sold-out-to-big-capital politicians, but I do not see how the next generation of corporation is going to be interested in employing everyone as the need to work shrinks. To summarise, I believe in equally divided work for equal compensation within what preserves the natural world, but I see no plan for that outside of the above, which I have said that I do not trust.
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Nov 3, 2020 17:56
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Crumbskull posted:Yeah, theres a wealth of literature about how co-ops combat the 'market failures' of regulatory capture/monopoly/monosopy etc. In the middle of last century a lot of American co-operative thinkers actually saw what pseudanonymous is describing as THE purpose of co-ops, sort of garauntors of a functioning capitalist market. Can you please share this literature? I want to learn more.
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Nov 3, 2020 18:58
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Kind of a sidebar, but does anyone know what kind of reputation Sprouts has as an employer? BBB and Glassdoor don't really have any info for the stores near me.
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Nov 3, 2020 19:06
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Discendo Vox posted:Twitter's a chud feed. Fixed that for ya
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Nov 3, 2020 20:35
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The next stage of retail is entirely cutting the retailer out. Amazon's success is not retail it's the marketplace. They cream off the high profit stuff and force everyone else to eat the scraps. You don't need a general store if you can simply search and find everything
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Nov 3, 2020 20:41
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Malcolm XML posted:The next stage of retail is entirely cutting the retailer out. Biggest obstacle to me using Amazon more than I do is that they have an absolute dumpster fire of a search system for specialty items.
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Nov 4, 2020 01:04
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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suck my woke dick posted:Biggest obstacle to me using Amazon more than I do is that they have an absolute dumpster fire of a search system for specialty items. There was a point in the mid 00s where their search and recommendation/etc. stuff was like, insanely good. I think it's an underrated factor among the various reasons they became so huge but it really was easy to find stuff. It's horrible now in comparison. And for some items now like clothing or some electronics/parts it's like the absolute worst place to go price-wise.
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Nov 4, 2020 02:00
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Neo Rasa posted:There was a point in the mid 00s where their search and recommendation/etc. stuff was like, insanely good. I think it's an underrated factor among the various reasons they became so huge but it really was easy to find stuff. It's horrible now in comparison. And for some items now like clothing or some electronics/parts it's like the absolute worst place to go price-wise. I swear they used to let you sort many more ways and set more requirements, and then they dumped that, very frustrating.
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Nov 4, 2020 02:22
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Malcolm XML posted:The next stage of retail is entirely cutting the retailer out. I am really concerned about Amazon. Having someone who controls the market, not the product, is a serious problem. I would suggest nationalising it in the various countries (US, Canada, France UK et al) where it exists except that A) I don't trust at least two of those governments and B) people for some reason think that anything that the government does is loving them over while somehow retaining a blind spot for corporations doing the same things. Such a huge online marketplace needs a neutral ground, one way or another. The naïveté of some people is staggering. In addition, I have seen a lot of evidence of Amazon going downhill in recent years, but that's not a surprise. They dominate the market (by being the market) so much that they can get away with being more and more mediocre due to economic power and the fact that people are invested and won't notice if they gently caress them over slowly enough. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Nov 4, 2020 |
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Nov 4, 2020 03:09
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JustJeff88 posted:I am really concerned about Amazon. Having someone who controls the market, not the product, is a serious problem. I would suggest nationalising it in the various countries (US, Canada, France UK et al) where it exists except that A) I don't trust at least two of those governments and B) people for some reason think that anything that the government does is loving them over while somehow retaining a blind spot for corporations doing the same things. Such a huge online marketplace needs a neutral ground, one way or another. Nah, the trend not mentioned is the rise of Brands and DTC. That’s why Nike is looking strong again for example. Also partly why Target is kicking rear end, their own brands are tremendous.
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Nov 4, 2020 03:12
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biggest usage-based problem with amazon is the delivery guys never even bother to attempt delivery at my apartment, despite having an intercom and a front door that doesn't actually lock
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Nov 4, 2020 03:38
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I'm a badass cuz I haven't used Amazon in over three years.
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Nov 4, 2020 08:06
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Hand Row posted:Nah, the trend not mentioned is the rise of Brands and DTC. That’s why Nike is looking strong again for example. Also partly why Target is kicking rear end, their own brands are tremendous. Bingo The internet removes the need for gatekeepers like intermediary stores Disintermediation is what's killing stores like Macy's
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Nov 4, 2020 18:16
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The amount of no-name gibberish Chinese garbage flooding Amazon these days is quickly reducing its usefulness to me.
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Nov 5, 2020 03:26
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LibCrusher posted:The amount of no-name gibberish Chinese garbage flooding Amazon these days is quickly reducing its usefulness to me. Agreed
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Nov 5, 2020 05:24
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Every product under capitalism eventually becomes a fake, nonfunctional and malicious imitation if allowed to.
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Nov 5, 2020 05:36
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Yeah I was a super heavy user of Amazon and now it's crazy hard to find what I want that's legit and not some crazy knockoff or reseller with a 50% markup. I really only use Amazon now when my credit card reward points break 100 bux or so where I don't feel so bad paying slightly higher prices on a thing because I'm too lazy to drive to the store.
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Nov 5, 2020 17:45
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https://twitter.com/IGN/status/1324479369994211328?s=19
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Nov 6, 2020 00:07
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LibCrusher posted:The amount of no-name gibberish Chinese garbage flooding Amazon these days is quickly reducing its usefulness to me. This is me as well and it's having an effect of me not buying even well known brands from them. I dont trust that it isn't knockoffs. I don't think I'm alone in this.
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Nov 6, 2020 00:57
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We buy basically everything there because my wife has no immune system, but it's still very annoying.
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Nov 6, 2020 01:09
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LibCrusher posted:The amount of no-name gibberish Chinese garbage flooding Amazon these days is quickly reducing its usefulness to me. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who noticed, but it's hard not to default to them the first time I look for something. Free shipping and their return policy are great but what's the point if I keep returning half the things I buy for various reasons? Especially clothes that end up not fitting. I'm giving kmart a shot this week, since it turns out they sell some brands of clothing that aren't on amazon anymore and I know they fit.
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Nov 6, 2020 01:15
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