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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Post-Crash Index-Moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Box-By-The-Riviera™ who wrote (62795)	3/15/2012 5:33:24 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 119360

AppleTV IMO will be a dud. QCOM tried it, didn't work out. TV is a home-based activity, to do when you have nothing else to do or to use it as a center of social events, i. e., football, tennis matches, etc., where fun and food and good times at home are the point. In the home, TV is fully developed. If aapl wants to market it as a mobile sort of application, good luck. I can't see consumers using iPads or iphones to watch TV.

To: Box-By-The-Riviera™ who wrote (62795)	3/15/2012 5:50:06 PM
From: ggersh	3 Recommendations Respond to of 119360

An excellent read..... harpers.org Killing the competition: How the new monopolies are destroying open markets By Barry C. Lynn Today, our overlords not only refuse to defend the power they hold—they deny that it is even possible for any American to accumulate such power. And to make such an absurd claim stick, they (or the more politically sophisticated of the academic economists in their employ) have undermined our language itself. Their most impressive act of lexical legerdemain was the coinage of various misnomers, some so audacious as to be worthy of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Corporate monopoly? Let’s just call that the “free market.” The political ravages of corporate power? Those could be recast as the essentially benign workings of “market forces.” Even more dangerous was the transformation of efficiency into the highest economic good. For centuries, dating back to the British East India Company’s promise to manage our tea trade for us, Americans have used antimonopoly action and law to protect our liberties as producers. Along the way, we learned to distrust most talk of efficiency as a justification for reducing the number of buyers. It was this very sentiment that inspired Justice Louis Brandeis to celebrate the political and economic virtues of “friction” in a 1926 Supreme Court decision. Little more than a generation ago, however, economists of the “Chicago School” began to publish studies claiming that the enforcement of our antimonopoly laws was harming the interests of that defenseless figure, the American consumer, by promoting “wasteful” competition. After Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, his new head of antitrust enforcement, William F. Baxter, swiftly abandoned efforts to promote competition and promised instead a policy “based on efficiency considerations.” The goal now was to promote the “welfare” of the consumer, theoretically by increasing his or her access to cheap goods. No gun was ever fired, no protest ever mounted, no direct attack on our antimonopoly laws was ever unleashed. Yet the most fundamental purpose of these fundamental laws—to protect the liberty of the citizen and to ensure the safe distribution of power—was flipped on its head by the innocent-sounding substitution of a few key terms. And in the three decades since, the impact of this rhetorical sleight of hand has only grown. The “consumer welfare” framework has provided its creators with exactly the cover they need to write their efficiency argument straight into the mainstream of American law and to erect their private corporate governments right in the town square of the American political economy.