Global Wealth: One Giant Pyramid Scheme?

[Odin]

I don't get why people equate Communism with government ownership, you can have private enterprise controled by workers, as in co-ops. My idea is that all private bussinesses be controled equally by the employees, each employee gets an relatively equal amount of the profit (it should't be totally equal, but the highest pay shouldn't be more than 3 times the lowest pay). The workers then elect the board of directors from among themselves.

[Kuciwalker]

Because half of the failure of communism was due to state control of industry.

How about we use capitalism instead? Then, a company can try out your system, and if it is more efficient, it will succeed?

[Cruddy]

Originally posted by Oerdin
As I recall Commedore also came up with a GUI for their Amiga machine but some how Amiga just didn't take off. It was to bad to since Amigas were way ahead of Apple and IBM on Graphics; for a while most graphic artists and computer animation guys were using Amigas.

Not quite true. I still miss some of the features of the Amiga GUI - the ability to run many different screens on the same monitor at the same time, one behind the other. Much better filehandling like Unix, but it's a dead system (OK, there are still PowerPC Amigas out there but it's never going to have the impact it once had).

What made the Amiga ideal for those people was the video output. You could run the output straight out the back into a monitor or VCR. With a modest amount of money you could even use it with pro equipment. Unfortunately, there wasn't a huge amount of need for a video computer - and as a computer, it was always horribly, horribly Slowwwww. Some are still in use in video work, although as a computer, even the 486 DX mashed it on power v price.

Kailash Ambwani, you should never have cut the CBM research budget. You are to blame for that failure.

Originally posted by Sava
I wouldn't say that Gates' exploits. He is one of the luckiest motherfuggers on the planet. In capitalism, when someone invents or creates something that revolutionizes the way things are done, the money rolls in. I don't want to get into an argument about Windows here... but Gates brought a product to the marketplace that nobody else could provide. You can argue Mac all you want, but if they were really better, the vast majority of comps wouldn't be Windows based PC's.

Actually, Microsoft was build on MS-DOS (originally QDOS). Companies bought it because it did everything that PC-DOS did and was cheaper. Not to say Windows wasn't a much bigger cash cow - but it would not have happened without the early market sew up that was MS-DOS.

Call me a nerd. See if I care

[Jaguar]

I know someone in the top 1000. . They have a huge house. They also have a kind of stupid dog, and when they moved to the new house the dog got lost.

[DAVOUT]

Originally posted by Odin
I don't get why people equate Communism with government ownership, you can have private enterprise controled by workers, as in co-ops. My idea is that all private bussinesses be controled equally by the employees, each employee gets an relatively equal amount of the profit (it should't be totally equal, but the highest pay shouldn't be more than 3 times the lowest pay). The workers then elect the board of directors from among themselves.

This has been undertaken several times; it always fails, because of a systematic lack of financial long term planning : no money set aside for necessary capital expenditures, every available cash being spend in salary and fringe.