This particular cable merger would be bad. With that out of the way:

Tons of mom-and-pop shops with a good product but terrible process get bought by companies like Proctor & Gamble who have far better and more efficient processes. They then produce the same great product with more reliable quality at a much lower cost.

    My own company may well become an example- we make terrible products, and have bad process, leading to very slow customer service, etc. That's because I'm very good at designing innovative new software systems, and very bad at running a business. I can think of a dozen well-run software shops that would make us better by taking us over. Their process, their customer service, billing department, etc and our products would be a huge improvement.

Aside from small companies who just never developed good processes, there have been many famous brands that have been bankrupt or on the way to bankruptcy before being aquired by a better company with a clearer vision or better execution. Given that these companies were going bankrupt, or already bankrupt, for them to survive at all (as a division of a larger company) is better.

One big, big name is Youtube, who was burning through other people's money faster than a drunk Kennedy and getting rightfully sued every 5 minutes for copyright infringement. They had a cool idea, and a completely non-sustainable business model that was guaranteed to put them belly-up within 36 months until Google bought them. Google brought to bear their expertise in funding a free service in a way that keeps customers happy (aka the best targeted advertising available) , allowing YouTube to survive and thrive rather than burning away investors' money until investors got sick of it and'the whole thing imploded.

How so? The "No True Scotsman" fallacy doesn't apply. You know, people _can_ lie and misrepresent themselves. It can happen in the real world. And you don't get to just yell "No True Scotsman" to make it go away. The hilarious thing is you're actually quoting a fallacy that doesn't apply to misdirect the conversation away from the dirty little secret: that socialism works; and that the overwhelming weight of evidence is that it's alternatives do not.

It's the old "No True Scottsman" argument. At any rate what you're describing is called _communism_. You can have socialism (large scale involvement by a central power in the well being of the common man along with wealth distribution) and still have ownership. You just don't allow ownership to become power at the expense of people's well being. As soon as you do that you've just crossed over to socialism.

businesses flock to Canada because their socialized medicine is so much cheaper than America's employer based system. Germany's Unionized car manufacturing is the envy of the world. Meanwhile the UK, who implemented American style policies under Thacher, has been in a nose dive for decades. Where in the world have you been?

a strange co-dependent relationship

Yes, they manufacture products and we manufacture debt. A match made in.....well...

Somebody please provide ONE case of a merger making a bad company better.

Short of emergencies, 'free internet' is a requirement I shop for. If it's a working trip, internet would be a *reimbursable* expense for work, thus increasing the effective cost of the hotel, making it effectively more expensive than the one that includes wifi, thus they'll route their people elsewhere.

As for blocking wifi but not cell phones because it pisses customers off, if they put a faraday cage up they could put cellular boosters inside the hotels to transmit those frequencies out.

Of course, the number of personal hotspots that would pop up...

When they come asking what we spent all their money on we'll just say: "All these Bombs and missiles..."

and the only real navy in the worlds. Our military can defend our country against anything, and we can pretty much seize anything we want. China isn't a credible threat. We still have more than enough nukes to make the world uninhabitable and any time we stop feeding their population they collapse...

and our leadership knew it. After WWII they towed their tanks back home with pack animals because they didn't have gas for christ's sake. We needed a foe to keep the military industrial complex going, and we needed the Military Industrial Complex to keep wealth inequality from tanking our economy again. Fear of communism is the only thing that kept the vulture capitalists at bay...

Don't tell us what the fuck a docker is or anything...

Oh, do tell... please name one of these "many models".

The Hobbit just isn't as cinematic a story as LOTR.

They invaded countries that had oil. Can China invade a country that has dollars and basically say "gimme your dough?" Would not that act of invasion itself destroy the target's economy (and dollars)?

And if in the position of securing a political goal the dictators decide that the gain outweighs the damage to their economy, they will--in glowing, happy, joyful terms--tell their population to go ahead and suck it up.

Counting on self-interest to stop bad actors is no guarantee.

sr