I'm of the opinion that there has been a big shift in shareholder expectations over the last thirty or forty years. Sometimes I wonder if it is related to a rise in large institutional investors often being the largest shareholders but I have no knowledge on the subject to substantiate that hypothesis.

Wasn't the last "earth-shaking" announcement that of bacteria using arsenic instead of phosphorus in their molecular construction?

They'll want to be very sure about whatever it is before going public.

So, demonstrably false some time ago. My US history is quite poor but I'm guessing about a century ago?

The world's slightly different now and the primary duty of any company is to it's shareholders, so it is more likely that unprofitable areas would just be ditched rather than being permitted to lower overall profits. Maybe once upon a time it was fine if a company still turned an overall profit even if part of the business wasn't generating as much revenue as the rest but now the shareholders wouldn't tolerate that.

Absolutely. If reality doesn't fit your political dogma, then when given the opportunity you simply change either reality or peoples' perception of it.

It has already worked for a long, long time.

What makes that ironic is that from seeing maps of state presidential election results; the GOP votes seem to dominate areas that a private enterprise performing mail carriage wouldn't go near because they'd be unprofitable.

Competition for postal services in a big country won't work. It's only profitable to deal with the high population centers because low population areas would hit profits too much to be worth doing.

Kind of like a cable infrastructure for internet in a way.

The first paragraph is opinion, the second paragraph factual and really just indicate a distrust of corporations which I wouldn't really label as socialist. Enterprise is fine but corporations seem to be only on course to abuse.

And mouse gesturing has been a feature of, at least, the Opera browser some time.

FTFY

The offspring don't have to be smart to acquire more wealth. Accountants and fund managers take care of that for them.

Yeah, our politics are rotten beyond the comprehension of someone who lived in Ancient Greece.

This idea will spread if corporations can profit it from it. Expect to see "proprietary" metering coming to electricity, gas, water, fuel and anything else that can be metered.

And of course they would treat customers like that. The primary constituency that a corporation is focused on is the shareholders and they are deemed far more important than customers, who come further down the priority list. Customers are still more important than the corporation's rank and file staff though, if that offers any solace.

It was a bad label in the first place. I wonder if whoever coined it even suspected that decades later people would still be quibbling about the semantics instead of the actual cause.

Ah, the silver lining to the story.

And don't have an agenda that only benefits a shrinking percentage of the population; or at least don't piss off the growing part of the electorate so much.

Yes, I have often made the point about oil to friends making this claim because it seems unlikely that the civilizations could reach, or as some claim exceed, current technology levels without using fossil fuel.

Those speculative civilizations also don't seem to have used nuclear fission for energy. Not just because there's no evidence of uranium sources being depleted before we discovered it, but it doesn't seem that the by-products from it have ever found as "naturally occurring".