[kwlug-disc] AI and social justice

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

> From: John Van Ostrand <john at vanostrand.com>

> In the past companies (local ones at least) had to care about their
> employees more. Today companies can fire people knowing that they'll have
> unemployent to lean on for a while, knowing that they'll have health care,
> knowing there is a support system to help if it gets worse. It sounds
> callous, but that typically helps small business more than large business.

I didn't like the paternalism of the old days.  But it did make the 
companies more like families (good and bad).

In the US, most health insurance is tied to employment.  That seems to 
create an unpleasant dependency.  We have it here for dental coverage 
which doesn't seem as serious.

> ... The solution is things like right-to-repair and
> restricting proprietary advantages. Maybe refactoring patent and copyright
> laws and base its term partly on ROI.

IP laws grant monopolies.  All monopolies ought to be considered 
carefully.

> Company performance and most shareholder decision-making
> don't take into account shareholder taxes, and for good reasons.  Every
> shareholder has a different tax burden, They may actually be in a different
> province or country and certainly they have different numbers on their tax
> returns.

I think that a fair number of decisions are based on tax issues.  For 
example, share buy-backs vs. dividends.  A number of transactions are 
designed to be "tax efficient".

Big tech companies were often structured to make all their profits in
Ireland, for example.  There has been some cracking down on this.

> Corporations are run by shareholders, who put a management team in place.

Formally, that's true.  It looks as if many corporations are run for the 
advantage of top management -- apparently shareholder interest is too 
diffuse.

> I don't think governments are as broken as people think. At least not any
> more broken than any large organization.  However I do think one issue
> today is lack of competitiveness. We have too many oligoplies and
> monoploies. Anything that large needs more regulation to ensure that the
> small guy can compete better. I have very few ideas on what that entails.

Canadian anti-trust legislation (Combines Investigation Act, if I
remember correctly) is very reluctantly applied.  Too bad.

Big multinationals are hard for a small country to reign-in.  US, EU,
and PRC seem to be the only nations with sufficient heft.  And the
monopolist's host country often defends the monopolists from attacks
by other countries.

The US anti-trust rules were hobbled by a Supreme Court ruling that only 
horizontal integration mattered (clearly false) and earlier rulings say 
that only financial harm to consumers mattered (also clearly false).