GUI

[Anton Markov]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1



Peter L. Peres wrote:
|
| The illegality consists in price dumping conditioned on non-competition.
| The prices of M$ products vary such that they undercut the competition,
| regardless of any losses they may incur. The prices are high when there is
| no competition, and undercut the competition whenever there is any. Since
| the products are mostly software in theory they can give them away for
| free. But they don't do that. They just make them cheap enough that the
| competition has no bread to eat, even if in theory this causes them to
| lose money.
It's non of your business whether Microsoft makes or looses money.
Until you build your own multi-billion dollar empire, you have no right
to criticize Bill Gate's business plan.  Criticizing those more
successful then ourselves is a sign of laziness and communism.

And there is no known law in North America (I don't want to hear about
some socialist country in Europe) that says it is illegal to make your
competition loose money.  That's the whole point of competition - some
win, some loose.

| Worse, they condition this on non-sale of competitive products.  This
| breaks the laws on allowed pricing policy in at least half the civilized
| world as I know it.
You mean the half of the world that lives under a communist/socialist
regime where everyone is essentially on welfare letting their life be
run by beurocrats?

You want pricing policy?  The USSR had plenty of that.  In 1919-1921
that led to a famine that cost nearly two million lives.  And this
happened again, and again, and again.

| Worse again, after the competition folds, the prices
| double or triple.  This is why price dumping is illegal. It can put a
| competitor with deep pockets (or with artificially very cheap labor)
Where did those deep pockets come from.  Maybe they where created before
the company becomes a monopoly through legal practices?  How many people
found employment and how many sub-contractors and suppliers
(construction firms, hardware manufacturers, office supplies, ...)
received business while these "deep pockets" where created?

Cheap labor?  I think that it is up to every individual to decide how
much they want to work for.

| in
| the monopolist position within a few years, while causing countless
| businesses to fold and loss of tax income from such businesses plus
| unemployment that cannot be sustained (for lack of a tax base) on a
| massive scale.
| ...
The whole idea of sustaining unemployment through tax money, and the
very idea of taxes is flawed.  But lets not get into that.

| Fri in most civilized places there are solid rules about
| published prices and the obligation of companies to stand by them. This
| means *both* upwards *and* downwards adjustments are not allowed (within
| reasonable limits) once the prices are published.
Can you name these "civilized" places?

| ...
| Remember taxes are percentual and such 'schemes' can be considered
| tax evasion attempts, besides being price dumping. The taxation shifts
| from retail taxation to corporate income taxation, which saves the company
| a bundle.
Are you supporting the idea of taxes?  What has this country come to?

| Several attempts to do such things can be seen with ice cream brands,
| packaged food brands in supermarkets etc. They only work in places where
| there are totalitarian state monopolies or 19th century-style 'free
| exchange' capitalism with huge monopolists eliminating competition from
| the market and fixing prices at will. Most are illegal when the price
| dumping item enters the equation. Ianal.

"Free exchange" and "totalitarian state monopolies" are complete
opposites. The fact is that in totalitarian state monopolies if you
don't buy the government's product, someone comes to your door with a
gun.  In this country it's usually the people who point guns at the
suppliers.

- --
Anton Markov <("anton" + "@" + "truxtar" + "." + "com")>

GnuPGP Key fingerprint =
5546 A6E2 1FFB 9BB8 15C3  CE34 46B7 8D93 3AD1 44B4

~ "The difference between insanity and genius is measured only by success."
~ - Some bad guy from 007
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQE/yhr6RreNkzrRRLQRAmniAJ91cSDJbsRws5ZKaw+xPSma5CSf8ACcDZqr
3xYJCEwj8n9K9BmkNNZanMs=
=PzuJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml