Part of an ongoing series on questioning modern day capitalism policies

“Let’s Break Up Facebook like the Feds did to AT&T! We were so better off than having that pesky Ma Bell. So what if the markets would price them out? The free market failed anyways!” – Stereotypical American Consumer

 

 

The Too Big To Fail industry of Silicon Valley is going to pop and will most likely explode in the next several years. This industry began really around the time AT&T was broken up in the mid 1980s, and while many think the breakup of AT&T was a smart move, where is the same anger against companies like Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other big companies?

Does anyone realize that Mark Zuckerberg feels like he’s richer than God or that he own platform acts a service to their own employees? How are employees there? Do they feel valued? Are they being abused or mistreated? Research shows that Millennials aren’t verse in retirement, how can they build that if the companies don’t support them? Where the hell is HR?

AT&T was not a perfect company but had good-faith intentions to serve the customer, and while older episodes of Saturday Night Live often mocked Ma Bell, if your internet goes down, whose going to come to your house on Christmas to restore it? Whose going to be there during a hurricane? Oh right, the techs insist to be like corporate employees so they can have all their time off when the people they claim they serve is entitled to have the same holidays like everyone else.

Nobody want’s to bust their ass anymore. I blame excessive capitalism. Things cheap, easy to purchase, easy to break, and whine about the quality and not following an age ol American norm of “personal responsibility” or “caveat emptor: let the buyer beware”. Sadly anyone trying to reason “the American Consumer”, will have no luck to teach them basic supply and demand and the cost of running a business without hoarding cash. The public believes acting like high school students hazing each other for your hard earned dollar is what kept this economy flowing. It’s not to say those enterprises were perfect or government intervention came in.

What drove AT&T’s prices down was unfortunately a system to make reliable telephones that one had to lease and rent, and in fact to keep maintaince cost down to those ol rotaries, was to make them bullet proof. Perhaps it was shady, but what was wrong with that? After some disruption via FCC policy, AT&T did get some competition. The phone service was so reliable, it was the envy of the world, people who made telephones and equipment had a job. It was made mostly in America. Where is that anger?

 

A series of a critical views on capitalism as this individual has followed more bull markets than bear markets, and would rather watch a stock ticker on cable news mixed with the juicy details of advancing vs declining stocks and knowing how many stocks hit annual highs and lows, where “going on your phone” requires reverting back to 1997 and going onto BigCharts to retrieve simple market information that no cable TV network cares to show screen anymore…

She’s into superstitions
Black cats and voodoo dolls
I feel a premonition
That girl’s gonna make me fall

She’s into new sensations
New kicks in the candlelight
She’s got a new addiction
For every day and night

She’ll make you take your clothes off and go dancing in the rain
She’ll make you live her crazy life, but she’ll take away your pain
Like a bullet to your brain, come on!

Ricky Martin, Partial lyrics of “Living A Vida Loca”

 

By the time said song was a hit, the dot-coms were on the up and up, “NASDAQ 10,000 by the end of 2000″…said the pundits! As a result of a backwards market beginning in the mid 1990s with the initial dot-com bubble, it began an avalanche of expectations a “company” is supposed to be after the 20th Century. Double-digit growth, ensure you got seed funding from the proper VC firms at the right time and like a good comedian, you time your offering at best market value like a good laugh. Years later, Silicon Valley was still Living the Crazy Life; it has lead into a really strange phenomena in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the last couple of years, the housing “demand” is so high, that one suburban house, a ranch, 1,000 sq ft; less than an acre property to be sold for literally a cool million. A house that burned down could be sold for that same amount of cash. Who in the hell could think a small plot of land could be priced so out of whack even for the largest metros in the country? Is there that many Steve Jobs out there with Reality Distortion Fields?

Heads of big VC firms are living a crazy and rich life too; with really out of whack economic views. And any startup that would compete against Facebook alike are probably falling through the cracks. Our employment numbers, to me needs to be seen in a skeptical lens. Are there people who have given up work? If so they are not counted. Has anyone that’s a normal minded person ever got through the first interview process at Google? Has anyone called out the discriminatory process at big tech companies they like to call “hiring seminars”? Has the industry listened to Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs and only would hire “the great” people, which are one and a million, or even more? Has the industry written off people because they are not “good enough”? Why does an industry have to be so reliant on coding? Why are people not redefining a corporate monopoly that is far from what AT&T was 35 years ago – and why are people comparing the software and services of the IT sector to what was a “regulated monopoly” of the phone company?

Oh right, I shouldn’t be asking questions, I am supposed to jam like it’s 1999 and just sing some Ricky Martin to waive-off the concerns of this out of control marketplace.

This is where I feel “group-think”, the speaking the verses out of the political bible of libertarians, social liberal/limited government, as well as the extreme capitalists who perhaps pray to the Gordon Gecko character 30+ years later, as well as the highly technical people have taken over an economy based on philosophy and not on real-world, and concrete business practices or norms that was “it was always done that way” for generations, centuries and millennia before. I mean c’mon Alexander Graham Bell didn’t go to a VC firm to consider marketing his invention. Nor did Grey, Kellogg or Western Electric who then marketed his own invention.

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