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from the do-you-really-want-Donald-Trump's-ear? dept.
The CEOs of Tesla, Uber, and Pepsi have joined President-elect Donald Trump's "Strategic and Policy Forum":
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped three additional high-profile chief executives including Tesla's Elon Musk to join a group that will meet regularly to give input on job creation and the economy.
Trump announced the first batch of CEOs for his "strategic and policy forum" on Dec. 2. The group is led by Stephen Schwarzman, the chief executive of Blackstone. Trump's transition team now said the group would expand to include Tesla's Musk, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and Pepsi chief Indra Nooyi.
From the article at The Wrap:
Trump announced the initial 16 members earlier this month, and the group will be chaired by Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman. According to a press release distributed by Trump's transition team, "Members of the Forum will be charged with providing their individual views to the President — informed by their unique vantage points in the private sector — on how government policy impacts economic growth, job creation and productivity."
Also at WSJ (paywalled).
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @12:48PM
I'm not surprised that Uber is in there. The CEO is an ayn rand freak (he named the company after rand's fantasy of superior men aka ubermensch) whose business plan is pretty much the most dehumanizing, rent-seeking plan [nakedcapitalism.com] of any modern tech company. And Trump's administration is packed with randians. [alternet.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @01:44PM
Friedrich Nietzsche says hi and wants his concept back from that hack Rand.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 17 2016, @02:03PM
For Uber (or any other radical industry restructuring) to be welfare enhancing, it would have to clearly demonstrate:
The ability to earn sustainable profits in competitive markets large enough to provide attractive returns on its invested capital
The ability to provide service at significantly lower cost, or the ability to produce much higher quality service at similar costs
That it has created new sources of sustainable competitive advantages through major product redesigns and technology/process innovations that incumbent producers could not readily match, and
Evidence that the newly-dominant company will have strong incentive to pass on a significant share of those efficiency gains to consumers.
The obvious rebuttal is Uber's activities in New York City. You have to remember here that there are a variety of other business interests such as traditional taxi companies that have a financial interest in denigrating the whole concept of Uber rather than merely the business, which clearly is doing a lot of things wrong. Conflating the business competence of Uber with the viability of its business is one such way.
And Trump's administration is packed with randians.
That's not a particularly graceful flavor of libertarian even by libertarian standards, but they might provide a needful correction to the statist excesses of the past half century. It's more promising a beginning for a Trump administration than I expected. We'll see what comes of it.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @02:21PM
> The obvious rebuttal
Drink!
————————————————————————
The khallow Obvious Rebuttal Drinking Game:
Every time khallow says "the obvious rebuttal" everybody takes a shot.
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=16849&cid=437967 [soylentnews.org]
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 17 2016, @03:34PM
The obvious rebuttal: you're obsessed!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @03:45PM
His drivel wears thin, so one day you go to google and do a site search and realize you aren't imagining it.
Now you have an excuse to drink. You are welcome!
Ethanol-fueled ought to get in on this.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Sunday December 18 2016, @12:16AM
His drivel wears thin, so one day you go to google and do a site search and realize you aren't imagining it.
The great majority of these linked comments are people who just didn't think things through. That's what makes an obvious rebuttal, obvious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @11:25PM
Wow, that is an awful lot of obvious butt for all! Do we really have to go over all this again? Keep an eye out for "Unter" real soon.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Sunday December 18 2016, @12:11AM
For example, if some pundit bloviates [soylentnews.org]:
In fact, the central tenet of New Deal competition policy was not big or small government; it was distrust of concentrations of power and conflicts of interest in the economy. . The New Deal divided power, pitting faction against other faction, a classic Jefferson-Madison approach to controlling power (think Federalist Paper No. 10).
Then they should have been aware of well-known New Deal policies that didn't do that, such as my example, the National Industrial Recovery Act which was a huge power grab by FDR which ultimately was blocked by the Supreme Court, or the subsequent attempt to pack the Supreme Court with cronies when the Supreme Court turned out to be such an obstacle. Or if someone bloviates [soylentnews.org]:
These top-of-their-profession projects show that the driver to bring artificial intelligence into any field isn't the amount of labor, but rather the cost of that labor. A lawyer costs fifty times more per hour than a retail worker and so is that many times more likely to find themselves with an AI competitor.
while ignoring that they're speaking of vaporware (IBM Watson).
There's a pattern to stuff (you can thumb through this list for many such examples) that triggers the "obvious rebuttal" phrase: bloviation about stuff while ignoring something blindingly obvious. Hence the rebuttal which is... obvious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:44AM
OMG! You have exactly zero self-awareness.
Do you dream of origami unicorns?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:59PM
> Or if someone bloviates
If bloviation is what it takes for you to go full autistic in a reply, then you should be drowned in the infinite recursion of criticizing yourself because, damn every single one of your "obvious rebuttals" is a freaking poster child for bloviation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @04:21PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 17 2016, @04:24PM
Only a summary, sorry.