Monopolies are good for monopolists only

America’s first Gilded Age began in the late nineteenth century with a raft of innovations—railroads, steel production, oil extraction—but culminated in mammoth trusts run by “robber barons” like JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and William H.Vanderbilt. The answer then was to bust up the railroad, oil, and steel monopolies. We’re now in a second Gilded Age—ushered in by semiconductors, software and the internet—which has spawned a handful of hi-tech behemoths and a new set of barons like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The answer now is the same as it was before: Bust up the monopolies. 

• Nearly 90% of all internet searches now go through Google. Facebook and Google together account for 58% of all digital ads. They’re also the first stops for many Americans seeking news (93% of Americans receive news online). Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything.
• With such size comes the power to stifle innovation. Amazon won’t let any business that sells through it to sell any item at a lower price anywhere else. 
• Google uses the world’s most widely used search engine to promote its own services and Google-generated content over those of competitors. Facebook’s purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram killed off two potential competitors.  
• Contrary to the conventional view of America as a hotbed of entrepreneurship, the rate new job-creating businesses have formed in the United States has been halved since 2004.
• Such size also confers political power to get whatever these companies and their top executives want. Amazon—the richest corporation in America—paid nothing in federal taxes last year. Meanwhile, it’s holding an auction to extort billions from states and cities eager to have its second headquarters. It also forced Seattle, it’s home headquarters, to back down on a plan to tax big corporations like itself to pay for homeless shelters for a growing population that can’t afford the sky-high rents caused in part by Amazon. 
• Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who holds the world’s speed record for falling from one of the most admired to the most reviled people on the planet, just unveiled a plan to “encrypt” personal information from all his platforms. The new plan is likely to give Facebook even more comprehensive data about everyone. If you believe it will better guard privacy, you don’t remember Zuckerberg’s last seven promises to protect privacy.
• Google forced the New America Foundation, an influential think tank it had helped fund, to fire researchers who were urging antitrust officials to take on Google. And it’s been quietly financed hundreds of university professors to write research papers justifying Google’s market dominance.
• Regulating the tech mammoths like utilities or common carriers would put government into the impossible position of policing content and overseeing new products and services. A better alternative is to break them up. That way, information would be distributed through a large number of independent channels without a centralized platform giving all content apparent legitimacy and extraordinary reach. And more startups could flourish. 
• The combined wealth of Zuckerberg ($62.3 billion,) Bezos ($131 billion,) Brin ($49.8 billion,) and Page ($50.8 billion) is larger than the combined wealth of the bottom half of the American population. 

Some of the robber barons of the first Gilded Age were generous philanthropists, as are today’s. That didn’t excuse the damage they did to America. Monopolies aren’t good for anyone except for the monopolists. In this new Gilded Age, we need to respond to them as forcefully as we did the first time around. 

Read the source article

In a democracy, no one should be allowed to grow beyond the reach of competitors.

Wealth accumulation reflects one’s character

• Tax havens are shadowy and sleazy little countries and principalities such as the Cayman Islands, Lichtenstein and Monaco.
• Low taxation countries like Switzerland, Singapore and Dubai assure secretive rich people of their privacy. 
• A tax haven exists to cheat sovereign states of their lawful incomes. 
• It is estimated that corporate tax avoidance costs governments $500bn a year while personal tax avoidance costs $200bn a year. This means that between $20-30 trillion of business transactions in various jurisdictions are sheltered from taxations. 
• Moody’s estimated that in 2016, giant American technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple were hoarding about $1.84 trillion cash in offshore havens. Clearly, they are avoiding taxes by bending the rules of the tax system. This is tax avoidance, which is not illegal for they are operating within the letter, but perhaps not the spirit of the law. 
• Tax evasion is just plain concealment of income and is a crime in all countries. 
• In 1980's, shaken up by many of its MBA graduates found wanting in ethical and moral values, the Harvard Business School made a course on “Leadership and Corporate Accountability” a core requirement. 
• Doing the ethics course is one thing but it is something else to be able to resolve the moral dilemmas of  “HBS’s ethical view of capitalism that derives its transformational view of money, in which the ability to accumulate wealth is a reflection of one’s character.”
• Market forces can be a potent driver for positive social change.
• The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
• Tax avoidance is as reprehensible as tax evasion. 
• Mauritius and Singapore are our two biggest sources of FDI.

Honesty is incompatible with amassing a large fortune - Mahatma Gandhi

Read the above Article

Cockroach Theory for Self Development

Sundar Pichai - CEO, Google

A beautiful speech by Sundar Pichai - an IIT-Stanford Alumnus and Global Head Google Chrome and now CEO of Google.

At a restaurant, a cockroach suddenly flew from somewhere and sat on a lady. She started screaming out of fear. With a panic stricken face and trembling voice, she started jumping, with both her hands desperately trying to get rid of the cockroach.

Her reaction was contagious, as everyone in her group also got panicky. The lady finally managed to push the cockroach away but …it landed on another lady in the group. Now, it was the turn of the other lady in the group to continue the drama.

The waiter rushed forward to their rescue. In the relay of throwing, the cockroach next fell upon the waiter.

The waiter stood firm, composed himself and observed the behavior of the cockroach on his shirt. When he was confident enough, he grabbed it with his fingers and threw it out of the restaurant.

Sipping my coffee and watching the amusement, the antenna of my mind picked up a few thoughts and started wondering, was the cockroach responsible for their histrionic behavior?

If so, then why was the waiter not disturbed? He handled it near to perfection, without any chaos.

It is not the cockroach, but the inability of the ladies to handle the disturbance caused by the cockroach that disturbed the ladies.

I realized that, it is not the shouting of my father or my boss or my wife that disturbs me, but it’s my inability to handle the disturbances caused by their shouting that disturbs me. It’s not the traffic jams on the road that disturbs me, but my inability to handle the disturbance caused by the traffic jam that disturbs me.

More than the problem, it’s my reaction to the problem that creates chaos in my life.

Lessons learnt from the story: “Do not react in life. Always respond.“

The women reacted, whereas the waiter responded.

Reactions are always instinctive whereas responses are always well thought of, just and right to save a situation from going out of hands, to avoid cracks in relationship, to avoid taking decisions in anger, anxiety, stress or hurry.

A beautiful way to understand LIFE.Person who is HAPPY is not because Everything is RIGHT in his Life.He is HAPPY because his Attitude towards Everything in his Life is Right!

Life doesn’t always throw at us pleasantries, but also disappointments. How we deal with these disappointments is what will determine whether our lives will be chaotic or whether it will be under control, and finding a solution to it. Many people try to blame other people for their problems. A good advice is that you should remain calm in times of stress. This helps you see the problem in a different perspective and helps you think of ways of dealing with the problem. It is much better to respond to life stresses instead of reacting to them. In this way, you will develop the right attitude in enriching your life, despite the challenges that come your way.