where a virtual company with a free product is going to use their powers as a monopoly to affect my life? If you think that facebook, which is a voluntary, needs to be broken up because it's too big than you've got some screws loose. No one is forced to use it (hopefully), other social media exists and is allowed to be created whenever by whomever, and it actually increases in value the larger it gets. A town owned facebook is useless.

This is a near perfect breakdown of time. The 0.5 hour from the exec and mid-manager is so true. There are 2 parts to the equation that you're missing however that get those numbers much closer to each other:

1. Not all production pushes have bugs that cause outages

2. Peer reviews do not catch 100% of those bugs

The total equation ends up 10 hours * %ChanceOfBug less than? 0.25 hours + (10.25 hours * %ChanceOfBug * %ChancePeerDetected)

Bill Gates has clearly added $600,000,000 in value toward society. The amount of worldwide jobs, enhancements, competitors, etc... that he helped start. Are you kidding?

Off the backs, seriously, wow; ya Steve Ballmer is super poor. Satya can probably barely feed a family. I heard that Paul Allen is on foodstamps now. Now that I reflect on your post it must be a joke. Microsoft has made thousands of people millionaires; and arguably indirectly created more jobs and raised the standard of living worldwide more than anything else in human history. At least the industry itself could claim that and Microsoft is a large player.

The fear of a corporate monopoly is misplaced and overblown. Corporate monopoly with government backing is IMHO the worst possible option. The current US Healthcare system is doing more harm than any corporate monopoly in history. We're taught to be petrified of these corporate monopolies taking over our lives, but even the Hudson Bay Company at it's height still had competition; everyone was scared of oil prices under Rockefeller, yet doomsday never actually came. Breaking up Ma Bell saved us from... we don't know.

Has there been a time or place that a corporate monopoly somewhere brought the people to their knees? Hard to find in history; De Beers, Luxottica, and Caviar are probably some of the most successful. If you avoid Diamonds, sun glasses and smelly fish you aren't even effected. However it isn't hard to find in the present day governments that are much more fearful and destructive. It's logical to be more fearful of a government monopoly.

All of those things are still paid for. The employees all pay taxes, and google is able to pay higher salaries because they dodge taxes. Local government and local taxes are generally better run, less wasteful, and able to fail and adapt; therefore distributing taxes to the employees and where they choose to shop, live, eat, etc... is a better model than dumping it in the massive federal level of a mess.

You're essentially trading advancement opportunity and part of your pay for security of a job. State laws, especially in CA, cover the vast majority of why Unions used to need to exist; now it's more about the bottom finding a way closer to the middle by forcing others there as well.

Clearly you do not have kids

and get over it. Whenever a city/state tries to mandate something that is the most common current cause of something bad it fails and just limits our freedoms more. In Mass we made it illegal to text while driving; why? well obviously because the odds of driving poorly are much higher while texting - which is very true; however just pull over people that are driving poorly. There is already a law for that. The result was accidents actually went up because most people try to hide their texting now.

Would you rather be on the road with someone texting and driving perfectly or someone driving like a nut because they felt like it? San Fran gains nothing from this information; if there is a new problem because of Uber and Lyft then directly address it, vote on it and fix it.

I'm sorry - but clearly people can and should earn millions of dollars each year. Everyone should want more and more people making millions a year - not less people. Most people work somewhere with a 'ladder' type layout, and at each step up you make a bit more. The misconception is that there is this guy making millions and below him are minimum wage workers; completely not the norm. If someone is making a million a year - directly below him/her are probably 10 people making 800k, and 20 people making 500k below them, etc...

Sports are the clearest place to look for what people can/should earn. Sports are the closest to 'fair' salaries because they prove day in and day out if they are worth it - and what they make is tied to how many people are willing to go watch them. If you're the best player in a sport you just might be worth 20 million a year - and sports are small compared to businesses. Picture if there were 500 professional sport teams in NY alone (pretend all business were as clear competitors as sports) - how much would Tom Brady be worth at that scale? Even Tim Tebow would be a starting QB (CEO) probably making close to 200 million per year. Business competes globally as well.

'Hard-earned' and worth are somewhat separate and you're thinking about it the wrong way. If you were on the board of a company making it big and competing against an IBM good luck trying to hire a CEO for less than a million a year and still existing in 5 years. In fact if you are already that big then there are already people there making far more than that; or you're paying a crap load of people good money to not do anything.

OnePlus 3 is close to what you're looking for. I personally got the Nexus 5 ($349) 3 years ago and it's the best phone I've used. It also still gets updates; whereas 1 year old $700 Samsung's hardly do (depending on carrier). I'm assuming the Vanilla Andriod OS is most of why it works so well - because the hardware at that price shouldn't be superior. I wish the Pixel could stay in the $400~ range, but I might just get the Nexus 6P for that; debating between the OnePlus 3.

If you buy a Samsung on Verizon you get bloat from both companies on the phone, and although Samsung wants it to work well - who do you think is programming for Verizon to make sure their 2-year-old-app-that-is-forced-in-the-background-to-run works perfectly with a new AndriodOS release? Not enough incentive for Verizon to bother - instead spending research on making the newer phones even better. They even prefer if you 'upgrade', even though the hardware is still really good.

Do you realize that the richest people in the world are all walking around with the same exact smart phone as many of the poorest? Talk about leveling the playing field. Who cares if someone is richer than ever but many things they can't even buy a better version of.
There will never be a scenario where the richest want to create something for so cheap that everyone can afford it, but so many people are unemployed that no one can afford it.

The cotton gin also caused massive unemployment; however everyone could then afford a shirt!

So with this precedence would the judge rule it illegal if I 'heard' that one brand of tractor was better than another but couldn't remember the exact source?

Of course if you run a business and people randomly post crap about it for no reason it sucks; but it sucks in person too. If someone randomly tells me to never to shop at Sears, oh well.

Would you rather:

It's better when the government does it?

Could Nokia have a tablet in the works? If so could they release them with Ubuntu or would their Microsoft agreement limit them to Windows on those as well?

I believe that was actually more of an Inventory issue. The bubble burst - the economy sucked - gas was through the roof, and American car makers focused mostly on larger gas guzzlers. The number of 'new' cars already built that weren't going to sell that year was going to be a gigantic financial hit. They lobbied to help get those cars out of the way.