SapphireSun

If college is part of a signaling arms race, if we conceive of education purely as a labor market good, why are we asking the laborers to stand down from that race and not the employers?

Scientists are running because they feel their class interests are being threatened. Typically, scientists are apolitical because they feel they get more benefits by maintaining the status quo (e.g. military and civil funding). In the face of a bald attack on the EPA and climate science, scientists are attempting to show class solidarity.

Unfortunately, many of the problems we have are not technical problems, but are clashes between left and right. The favored positions of both sides have long been established. Science will help implement an ideological solution, but will not replace ideology. To the extent that the scientists running are leftists compared with centrist democrats, this will be somewhat significant.

However, I suspect that many established scientists are ignorant of politics and see the current struggle as some kind of surface level fact vs fiction debate. They will be disappointed.

My apologies dang. I try to at least be on topic, and this is what has been intensely interesting to me in the past year. Thanks for moderating.

Mainly because it's hard to suppress laughter if you think about it at all beyond a surface level. See discussion in another thread. I don't want to repeat myself.

Ok, last one. :) You've really just made a mockery of the ideology of competition haven't you? In fact, that is what corporations do. There's an awful lot of highly concentrated market power lying around for exactly that reason.

There are a variety of alternative arrangements that have been proposed. Economic democracy is one of them (that is, the workers control the company via elections, which will influence their pay).

The workers benefit somewhat from Apple, yes, in the form of a consumer gadget. I will grant Apple some utility, it did find a way to fuse existing science and technology in an interesting way to produce a very nice pocket computer.

However, this has had many effects, some good (access to information and maps), some bad (dissolution of privacy, addictive interfaces, the creation of "apps" at the expense of the open internet). Apple then uses this commodity to vacuum up dollars from consumers in excess of what it cost to produce... and do nothing with them other than allow executives and securities holders to slake their desire to accumulate. It's an addiction in itself.

Your reference to the double Irish arrangement completely undercuts your point. You admit that they aren't paying substantial taxes in a huge market they participate in.

With respect to Japan and China, a multinational company, an effectively stateless entity (or possibly a state unto itself) can simply move to the most profitable country, thus forcing countries to compete for its tax dollars. Thus, the multinationals, unless resisted via solidarity, will cause a collapse in all nations treasuries.

You have the right idea. That's probably what they will do, but not as a dividend (those are taxed as ordinary income). Instead they will buy back stock, reducing the supply of stock and increasing the price. Long term sales of stock incur a 15% tax rate.

I'm not saying this is good, but this is what they will do.

If they don't really need that money, why not give it to the people that could really use it?

I'm suggesting that capitalism is going to encounter a crisis point sometime in the next decade or two at this rate. It will destroy itself leaving either barbarism or socialism in its wake.